Lemmy.ca's Main Community

I think the main point of federation is being able to see something from Lemmy.zip with an account on Lemmy.ca. So if one service goes down, or a there is a difference of opinion on what the rules should be, the whole platform of "Lemmy" doesn't go up in flames.

This prevents one person or group from controlling everything.

Not entirely. While you can interact with content from other social platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube from Lemmy, federation is best experienced when you utilize platforms with similar use cases.

For example, the link aggregators (Reddit-likes) on the fediverse are Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and until recently, Lotide. Each of these platforms have similar looks and purpose with slight differentiation. While you can communicate with video streaming or microblogging like PeerTube and Mastodon respectively, it's best to stay within the link aggregators and make a new account for those purposes.

To give an example with microblogging on the Fediverse, there's also a number of options. Biggest one is Mastodon, but others include Misskey and it's endless forks, Smithereen, Pleroma/Akkoma, Mitra, Threads, etc. all with their own interesting quirks. While they can interact with Lemmy and whatnot, their best interactions are going to be with similar-purposed platforms.

It's also early on for most of these platforms. They're relatively new, changing rapidly, and so it's harder to keep the platforms compatible with everything that's out there.

As an example, there have been a few improvements over the past short while around Mastodon-Lemmy compatibility

Once the software matures, I imagine it'll be easier to see the content in most popular formats