Most servers do. Even Lemmy.World defederized from those tankie servers.

Imo that’s the beauty of how all of this works. If you’re on Beehaw and don’t like how they’re doing things, you can leave and go to another server without issue. It’s not like Reddit where you’re just sol.

I’m new to all of this, but my understanding is they defederated with lemmy.world as well. Would this impact them negatively in the long run considering this instance has such a large user base?

As is their right to do

You could do that on reddit too you just had aww awww awwww etc. This way isn't any different as it tells you what server aww you are reading. You then just community search aww and subscribe to the ones you want.

I don't see why not... It's like registering jack@gmail.com and jack@hotmail.com... Same name but not really

Yes. Claim 'em all now if that concerns you.

Technically you only need to register in one instance and can interact across lemmy and kbin instances, but you can register the same username in various instances in case of defederation. Lemm.ee federates with all and all instances federate with it for example, beehaw.org doesn't allow signups and has defederated lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.

See, I keep seeing people say that the federated services can interact with each other but I have yet to understand what that means. I have a lemmy and a mastodon account but I can't figure out how they're supposed to connect.

@Wild_Mastic yes, this is someone replying from mastodon. By default it adds ats for the thread and all comment parents to my post, but I can delete them.

I got here by finding this comment on the lemmy.world website and copying the URL into my mastodon client manually. If I wanted to spend time here specifically, I could get a feed of all your posts by following @Wild_Mastic, follow all posts from this sub magazine as if it were a user reblogging all content in it by following @main. I think there is also a way to follow any post to the instance but that would be something of a firehouse of information.

Regrettably, there is no great way to easily post with a nonlocal non-lemmy/non-kbin account to my knowledge currently outside of subscribing to these places prior to the post being made that you want to comment / interact with. But that could be done either with improved apps on desktop / mobile, integrations from existing apps or even something like a web browser addon perhaps.

I think so. But we can't microblog here (kbin has both). I know I've seen mastadon users comment on lemmy posts before.

Probably the wrong place for this kind of user support, but I've had the same problem on other services. The solution usually is that your 2FA device's clock is wrong. 2FA needs a synchronized clock between the device and the server.