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?
Lemmy is just merging the communities with identical names so posts from both appear under server.com/c/Music?
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.
Everything is perfectly clear now. Thank you everybody that replied. I am blown away by how many great replies this got in such a short time.
I’m still learning all this stuff too, so anybody please correct me if I’m wrong here, but to my understanding: They just exist alongside each other. They might locally have the same name but they’d have different URLs with the @[instance] suffix.
In your case, since you’re a lemmy.world account, if you wanted to go to “music” communities, you’d navigate to:
- lemmy.world/c/Music (this will take you to the “Music” community on lemmy.world)
- lemmy.world/c/Music@lemmy.ml (this will take you to lemmy.ml’s music community)
- lemmy.world/c/Music@beehaw.org (etc)
That’s correct.
Nothing gets merged, theyre completely separate, in the same way example@gmail.com and example@outlook.com are different email addresses.
some.lemmy/c/music is the music community on some.lemmy, if you want to see the music community on another.lemmy while you are at some.lemmy, you go to some.lemmy/c/music@another.lemmy
Ah that answers my question in reply to @Ulu-Mulu-no-die@kbin.social here!
You’re seeing me as kbin user? I’m on lemmy.world :O
Weird. It was the only option that popped up when I @ your username lol.
That’s interesting, I do have an account also on kbin, but I was writing on lemmy with my lemmy.world account, every time I think I understand federation it turns out I don’t lol :D
We’re all learning. And thanks for making this mistake so that I could learn from it too. :)
It was actually intended on my part, I mean, I’m using my lemmy account much more than kbin since I write on lemmy, it’s interesting to see kbin showed you that option, tho I wonder what would happen if it wasn’t me having that account name on kbin …
I’m also on kbin seeing you over there at lemmy.world
Communities with the same name across different instances are not merged, and the way they are referenced will be different. So, the location of lemmy.world/c/Music can also be referenced as !music@lemmy.world while instead the Music at serverB.whatever be can be referenced as music@serverB.whatever .
So when I see posts from a
@someUser@some-server.comin lemmy.world/c/music, they had to visit lemmy.world and create a post in the music community here?Not really, if someone from some-server join a .world community, that community is “copied” (cached) on some-server for all some-server users to use.
What happens is that people on some-server modify their local copy, then the copy is merged into the original on lemmy.world.
No, the point of federation is that you can interact with other sites/servers from your own since the same protocol is shared. So from some-server.com they visited music@lemmy.world and did their interaction. The same way you can go to the Music community at lemmy.ml ( https://lemmy.world/c/music@lemmy.ml ) without leaving lemmy.world and without having to create a new account. Your comments and interaction will be seen without problems by users of lemmy.ml .
Awesome, makes perfect sense. And now I am seeing that I can search by
Allin the communities, and subscribe to all of the duplicates. Lemmy is friggin’ sweet! Thanks for the answers. I was not expecting so many replies so quickly!
