We have Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, I think even yiffit.net. If I log in using wefwef it asks me where I want to login. And when I make a new account using another instance, it says ”… Lemmy is federated, so you can interact with everything on lemmy.ml even if you’re registered on a different instance.“ So if I’m registered on lemmy.world, how can I interact with lemmy.ml?
Think of them as different email servers. It’s all federated and connected. As long as you’re looking at the “all” timeline it will show you posts from across every instance. And you can follow communities across instances. For example I’m on a different instance than you but I can see your post and comment on it. Just start subscribing to some. check out the list below for a couple migrated subreddits.
https://www.quippd.com/writing/2023/06/15/unofficial-subreddit-migration-list-lemmy-kbin-etc.html
From what I’ve heard, only communities from other instances that users in your instance are subscribed to will show up. This is because (as far as I know) the instances only request data from other instances of what users have requested, and not a constant stream of updates that no one has a need for.
This is exactly correct.
This means there is a slight advantage to being on a larger instance. Of course, you’re gonna have to deal with a laggier experience as the server gets overloaded. If you don’t mind using the lemmy explorer to hunt down the subs you want to subscribe to, it’s a better experience.
Federation can lag too. Someone made this to track federation lags on big instances: https://aftershock.lemmy.management/public/dashboards/oT7pdcoeHWccpvZCNmTpJKoGZND8ZdRO3wDWpMug?org_slug=default
I couldn’t see the community I made on lemmy.world in lemm.ee until I searched for it multiple times until it finally showed up. So some users may believe the community they’re searching for may not exist, even though it does on an another instance. Best to use Lemmy Explorer just in case when looking for a community.
This “It’s just like email” makes no sense at all to me. My email is nothing like Lemmy. It is the most confusing description I have ever heard.
You have a gmail address. Your friend has a yahoo address. Your other friend has an outlook address.
It doesn’t matter at all because they all work together. That’s what they mean
It is “just like email” in a sense you can send email from your gmail to someone using yahoo, hotmail or even their own self hosted server and it still gets delivered despite all those different servers. And that’s where analogy of similarity to email ends.
I can’t think of how it is even close to the same as email other that both Lemmy and email use the @ symbol.
If I send an email to a friend, no one else can see it. That is a note between him and me. The comparison is perplexing.
Another way of looking at it is cross platform videogames where Kbin.social is playstation Lemmy.world is xbox and a third one would be Nintendo Switch. If the game has a chat feature what one person posts from xbox would appear for the playstation players and visa versa. Federating is basically when they first connect to each other to become multi platform.
