@talesofaprinny @kde I'm not sure how helpful this will be for you, but it's kind of like email. You have an account on one email server (like, say, Gmail), and you can use that account to exchange messages in a standard format with people on other email servers (Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Proton Mail, Fastmail, etc.), but your account on Gmail doesn't let you log in anywhere else. If you want to use any of those other servers directly, you need to create an account on the server you want to use.

Similarly, you can use your account on one Fediverse server (mastodon.social) to exchange messages in a standard format with people on other Fediverse servers (techhub.social, lemmy.kde.social, etc.), but your account on mastodon.social doesn't let you log in anywhere else. If you want to use any of this other servers directly, you need to create an account on the server you want to use.

You don't login, you just access it from Mastodon.

Hello from Lemmy.zip

While you can follow across the Fediverse, no matter the platform, not all kinds of cross platform follows make sense imo. I personally wouldn't follow Lemmy stuff from my Mastodon because it can get really floody. I also wouldn't generally follow Mastodon accounts from Pixelfed, or Lemmy from Pixelfed. It's really great that you can, but sometimes it's better to just make an account on the specific platform instead.

That's not how the fediverse works.

Your account can only be used from the instance it was created on. Your instance is connected to other instances in a way that allows you to interact with their content, without ever leaving your instance.

You can use your account to go anywhere in the fediverse, but you can't use that account to access the fediverse through any other entry point, or interact with every feature of every platform. All the platforms speak the same protocol, but don't necessarily have parity in terms of features.

It's like you're standing in one spot, and can look in any direction, but you can't move. You can see everything, in the way it looks from that one spot. If you want a different perspective, you need a new spot to stand on (a new account on a different instance/fediverse platform).

As an example, because you added @kde to your post, I can see it on the KDE community on Lemmy, and this comment was created on a Lemmy account. As a Lemmy user, I can't follow you, or see any of your posts that don't mention a Lemmy community.

To interact with all that stuff, I'd need to use a Mastodon account on a Mastodon instance, to get the full picture.

You don't. You follow @kde@lemmy.kde.social and at them when you want to post a thread there. Everyone commenting there should appear as an answer on Mastodon.