this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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A community is just that, a community. It's analogous to a subreddit, if you're familiar with reddit. One can start a community by clicking "Create Community" at the top of the Lemmy webpage on your instance. This community will be hosted on your instance, say you create a community for dogs, the community would be [email protected].
Your instance can be compared to a email provider. The instance is hosted on a server, as in you connect to a server which has set up the Lemmy software, which connects to the ActivityPub protocol. The ActivityPub protocol is what enables kbin or Mastodon users to interact with communities here.
Compare this to email, where an email provider (say Gmail) is hosted on a server, which you connect to. If done via a web browser, the server will direct you to their web app (the interface you use on gmail.com) which connects to the SMTP (which is the protocol that handles email).
Just like how I can receive your email sent from Gmail on my Yahoo account, we can interact in communities together despite having signed up on different instances.