So my understanding is that a community created on a certain server (say lemmy.world), can be interacted with by any other federated server, and any interactions from those servers are synced to the original “true” community / server. How does it work if two servers both have a community with the same name? Each server is the owner of content created there, and then Lemmy is just merging the communities with identical names so posts from both appear under server.com/c/Music?
/c/Music on server A could have drastically different rules from /c/Music on server B, so there’s potential for users on both to see posts that wouldn’t be allowed on their server?
No, lemmy doesn’t merge communities from different servers, they’re still different communities even if they have the same name (they actually don’t since their server name is part of the community name).
Think of it as different subreddits.
While on reddit you can’t have different subs with exactly the same name, there are still examples of same communities (that is subs dedicated to the same argument) with slightly different names, often spin-off of the original sub for various reasons.
They’re different subs with different people and different mods, if you want to see them all, it’s you who has to sub to all, not the server doing the merging for you.
is there a way to view them (or at least specific ones) as one merged thing?
Not as of now, but there are discussions among the devs about it.
Would be pretty cool if magazines/communities could form hubs around their subject. You could subscribe to the hub, and remove/add communities in the hub from other instances. And the community on your instance would control what instances are included by default in your hub sub.
Like a “default” technology hub that includes several technology magazines/lemmy communities and you can then personalize the hub by either adding magazines or communities that you think fit to that hub when you think they fit or remove them if you dont? Interesting idea. Didnt some reddit apps allow you to create meta-subreddits? Would be a very similar idea.