I have a picture of Tigger as the Carolina Panthers (NFL football team) logo

as long as the instances are federated, you can interact with communities on other instances. There’s alittle extra effort needed to subscribe to a community on another instance, but it’s not difficult.

it does mean that you are subject to the uptime of whatever server the community is on. So things like Lemmy.ml that are having difficulties right now affect more than just the users on that instance.