how do you follow a topic (rather than a person), reddit-style?

• I’m on kbin so it’s a little different, but you should be able to go to the communities page and search. You’ll see all communities from all federated communities. You just click on subscribe similar to Reddit.

what does all the talk on instances federating and defederating mean?

• Federated = connected and sharing a copy of posts. Defederated means one of the two instances has stopped that sharing ability with the other.

is it normal or expected that you join multiple instances to get your content? I’m juggling a few, because I can’t work out how to follow topics.

• Nope. Really no need to as long as you’re on an instance that’s federated. For example though, BeeHaw has defederated Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works so if you’re on beehaw you won’t see any of that content. If you’re on one of the other 2 you won’t get the full experience.

And if you do have different user accounts across instances, is there a way to link your own user profile between them? To give others a single view, or to make it easier to juggle all my instances?
I’ve heard it’s technically possible to follow content on Lemmy from Mastodon, for example. Is that a good way to consume content from single app?

• Mastodon is a bit different from Lemmy. It’s hard to read both from one app. Kbin is working on that issue by allowing microblogs. Still not perfect yet.