WindInTrees

Good stuff! Thank you for clarifying. This all makes a lot more sense now.

I see, so...

• If the instance my account is on is down or slow, I may not be able to log in.
• Only moderators from my account's server can take action against me? This seems... potentially problematic, unless the moderators from federated instances are all in communication with one another? E.g. if I'm a problem on one instance but not my home instance, is there nothing the moderators on the non-home instance can do?
• Could you elaborate on peering? Does that refer to which Fediverse apps a Lemmy instance can communicate with?

Related question for all you experts: if I have an account on both (for example) lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, what is effectively the difference between them if I can view content from any federated instance?

Are the China Cables documents not valid? https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-cables/read-the-china-cables-documents/