Since my last post yesterday, lemmy.world has added over 3000 new users, bringing the total user count to 22000 today (source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list). It firmly holds the position of the second-largest lemmy instance, surpassing beehaw.org by a significant margin of 10000 users.
In other news, beehaw has defederated from lemmy.world a few hours ago. How does the third largest instance only have 4 mods for its 12000 users?!
So much going on!
No, they can choose to see content from local communities. The users posting in those communities, and the people commenting on those posts, can still come from any federated site.