You should understand the rules of the places you are posting to, yes.
This is why "let's pretend this is centralized social media and ignore the fact that we're all on different websites" is a bad idea, actually. You don't get to parachute into someone else's house and expect the rules of your own home apply.
Carney has a reputation for being a Keynesian, as far as I know, which means we should hope to see a new wave of federal investment in infrastructure and a topping up of social programs. The wave of painting him as "every CEO's best buddy" seems really weird in that context, because the CEO's mantra since Regan has been "austerity and tax cuts".
Like, yes, he's not going to overthrow the system, but maybe Loretto should spend more time talking smack about the NDP's choices in the last eight years rather than complaining that the party of the system isn't radical enough to upend it.
I'm so tired of the leftist obsession with the Liberals, and how our constant attempts to be "right" do more to empower the far right at the expense of the centre than they do to bolster the left in any meaningful way.
It's like the whole movement is built on being a wet blanket.
If you follow a community (or a user, if you're using something that allows following user accounts, which Lemmy does not) on a remote website, that website will send the website you're using a copy of all future content they post, and your website will include it in your feeds (as well as in the sites's 'global' feed). It doesn't really matter what software those other sites are running, so long as they A) use ActivityPub, B) have federation turned on, and C) have not blacklisted the website you're using.
It's like following a Twitter user or a Reddit subreddit from Facebook. And it highlights that that's a thing they all could have done, if they all wanted to work together to make it happen.
They didn't. Fedvierse developers do.
So, there are different types of... the jargon term is "actors", but you can think of them as, like, accounts. Each user has an 'actor' associated with it, and each 'actor' has an inbox. But there are also group actors, which are not individuals, but more like a system or bot account. Group actors just "boost" (reblog/re-shaere/etc.) content that is sent to them.
You can follow other actors, both on your own website, as well as on other sites. When you follow a remote account, your host site will request the remote site send all future content posted or "boosted" by that account to your host website, and then your host website will add it to your feed.
Different software allows different kinds of requests. Mastodon makes no distinction between user or group accounts, and let you follow all of them. Lemmy, though, uses group actors for its communities, and only allows users to follow groups. This means that Mastodon users can see Lemmy discussions, and contribute to them, but Lemmy users cannot follow Mastodon users or interact with their posts unless they've been boosted by a group actor.
Other software has other abilities. nodeBB lets group actors follow other group actors, which has the potential for mutual group synchronization. mbin has both a Reddit-like interface as well as a separate microblog feed, separating out group and user content. Hubzilla (and I think Friendica?) allows accounts to have multiple actors, letting you manage multiple 'personas' from a single login. And they all speak the same language, which means they can accept content from all the others.
I cannot stress this strongly enough: You have not been "using Lemmy" for 1.5 years now. "Lemmy" isn't a service the same way Reddit is, it's a web engine, like Joomla, or like phpBB.
You've been using lemm.ee for 1.5 years.
Nobody wants to hear this, but there's no "Lemmy". This emergent network of social media sites isn't a coherent thing, and it's not a stable concept. The attempts to make this look like a singular space are to the ultimate detriment of the network, because implicitly lying to end users about what they're doing informs how they behave.
You've been using lemm.ee. Lemm.ee has copies of content on other websites, but those websites have different rules, and different expectations than lemm.ee. You don't get to pretend otherwise because of where you're reading the content, and there is no guarantee that you will have further access to content from any other website than lemm.ee.
This is a reality that people simply do not want to face, for some reason. Everyone wants to imagine that federation is just centralized social media with some voodoo in the background, but it is a fundamentally different paradigm, and this is the wild fucking west.
You're going to get your toes stepped on if you treat it like something it's not.