You’re welcome! I had a personal experience with this, too.

When I was a kid, my parents used to make me go to church and youth group stuff. We went to one of those “hip” events at Carowinds (like a Six Flags, Disney type amusement park). Before it started our youth leader said - to his credit - “No matter what you feel, DO NOT go down to the front when they call people up.”

Sure enough towards the end, I start feeling “the spirit”, and I’m the most skeptical, atheist/agnostic in the whole group. But I stayed in my seat. And when we got back to the hotel I was thinking “what the hell happened there?”

I’m back! I couldn’t find the specific thing I read, but I found something probably better, an actual study published in Pubmed:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8871314/

Statistical analyses showed that the psychological disposition during the religious worship experience speeds up the physiological responses, which was indicated by increases in HR [hear rate] and RR [respiratory rate]. Hence, the activation hypothesis was accepted, and the pacification hypothesis was rejected.

I’ll try to look for it. It was a loooong time ago though.

I read an article years ago that explained why so many people get “religious” feelings at big revival-type events at Six Flags, Carowinds, etc, even if they’re not particularly devout.

There’s a thing called respiratory alkalosis (essentially hyperventilation) which makes you light-headed and confused. At it’s really easy to trigger by making people stand up quickly, sing really hard, sit back down, stand up and cheer, etc.

I’ve been trying to think of a good metaphor, but I haven’t landed on one yet. The best thing I’ve thought of is the old saying:

Whereever you are, you’re here.

Federation (for lemmy) is the concept of the different instances sharing sublemmys, posts, and comments with each other. So you can be on any instance and interact or subscribe with things from another.

The strong caveat is: some instances turn off federation with others. For example, Beehaw has stronger moderation, and they had problems with users and spam from a specific other instance (lemmy.world was one, I think). So in that case, Beehaw turned off federation with lemmy.world. That means that if you were logged in to Beehaw, you would not see any new content from lemmy.world until they turned federation back on.

edit: I thought of one more thing. For communities that are run by their developers, like Minecraft, Lemmy is a great solution. They could host their own Lemmy instance (lemmy.minecraft) and lock down so that only their sublemmy - /c/Minecraft - is created. But when they federate, they get all the other content from other Lemmy instances.

• As a user, you could sign up with lemmy.minecraft or lemm.ee, etc., and still see everything you want and sub to the /c/Minecraft.

• As mods/admins, they only need to focus on their Minecraft thing. And they have complete control over that, because they can literally shut down the entire instance.