So here’s how I understand it:
lemmy.world, lemmy.fmhy.ml, beehaw, (instances) etc. are all basically different servers. But they essentially all have access to the same communities, aka the equivalent of a subreddit, even though some communities are are hosted on lemmy vs beehaw, etc.?
If my understanding is correct, then, for the layman, each different instance can be seen as a site to view any of the communities, so we can register with one instance, and browse everything they all have to offer. Is that about right? Sorry, I know a guide has been posted, but I’m trying to reduce the functionality to fit into my feeble mind.
Short answer: yes, you got it.
Long answer: yes, but you’ll see it’s not like magic. Some instances will federate with others, some will straightup block others, some will simply not federate, etc… but those are very extreme cases with very particular reasons.
That’s essentially correct, but a bit of further nuance is that different servers can choose which other servers it federates with or blocks. So in principle all servers can connect to all other services, but in practice that isn’t quite true. I’ve heard that there are indeed NSFW servers but most other servers don’t let them federate with them.
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When I visit the same community from different instances, I don’t see all the posts listed. Is the instance just slow to update? For example:
Home instance - https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/c/freemediaheckyeah/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
https://lemmy.world/c/freemediaheckyeah@lemmy.fmhy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
https://reddthat.com/c/freemediaheckyeah@lemmy.fmhy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
https://lemmy.ml/c/freemediaheckyeah@lemmy.fmhy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
The other instances haven’t updated yet to show the latest posts.
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Would there ever be a way to synchronize content between communities on different servers? What I see as the problem here is that there may be, let’s say, several Zelda communities on different servers, all with different content, so it would become difficult to follow all. Or is there any mechanism in place to prevent communities from being replicated?
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Yeah, I guess eventually things will get consolidated into single communities or you may have a few rival communities similar in size but hopefully fragmentation shouldn’t be too much of an issue. Should be fun though.
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The major downside of this, if I understand correctly, is that this also applies to usernames. For the most part this won’t be a problem but I can easily imagine a specific type of trolling that can come from this feature.
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Yup. It’s like email.
You can have a gmail account, but still send and receive to and from someone with a hotmail account.
The emails that you both see, are stored on gmail and hotmail, but not on protonmail, unless you cc’d someone with a protonmail, in which case, it gets stored and becomes accessible, there too.
Personally, I don’t think the e-mail comparison is very clear, nor entirely correct.
I think it’s easier to explain like: everybody can make their own Reddit, but you can also see all the content on other people’s Reddits.
