I find it the height of irony that you have submitted this duplicate post to both of these “c/Fediverse” communities:-). This is the very type of thing that is going to confuse people. Like “why is there a @CyberTailor@beehaw.org, a @CyberTailor@Lemmy.World, a @CyberTailor@lemmynsfw.com and others, but they might be the same person - and yet they might not - and then some of them post to !Fediverse@lemmy.world, while others may post to !Fediverse@lemmy.ml - so like users then, are those also the same person? or community or whatever? Or are they always different ones, and if communities are always different, then why aren’t the users always different too?”

Face it, the experience on Lemmy.World is close to that of the centralized Reddit, but everywhere else it is not even close. e.g. my post here has 193 upvotes (and 2 downvotes), while the original says 186, but here it only has 98, and here it has none, nor any comments either.

We are a loose federation of instances - we are virtually nothing like any email system that I have ever used, where various portions of the same message show up - or not - depending on which email system you try to access the same message from (afaik, that’s not even a thing - you have the sender and the recipient and that’s it?). The reason people struggle to understand the email analogy, imho, is bc it doesn’t work, and we should go back to the loose federation of instances idea bc that’s what we truly are.

Everyone needs to read that post. 99% of Lemmy/Mastodon users do not know how incredibly highly self-selected they are for a level of tech engagement that is orders of magnitude beyond what the vast majority of people are willing to engage in.