This is a case where the email analogy is perfect. In your question you create an address "[email protected]" and someone else creates an address "[email protected]." Both accounts will be able to send email to each other and anyone else can send or receive email to/from both addresses. But email sent to "[email protected]" will not show up at "[email protected]" nor vice versa.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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It makes me think of Discord servers. There are lots of channels that share the same name but they are all on different servers. You can visit any and all of them if you like but they are not connected.
Where this analogy fails is you cannot see or send messages without joining the server. And on Lemmy you can.
They'll "sync" in that you can access them on either instancs, but as separate communities.
!MyCommunity@ServerA and !MyCommunity@ServerB are different communities hosted on different servers. Some people can see both, some can only see one or the other. They likely have different rules, communities, and culture.
There are a few tickets to improve/implement this, but, for now, the communities are completely separate.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3100 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3057 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071
So, look for to improvements in the future.
To be fair, my understanding of the entire internet is that the entire point is that they remain separate. They can sync on their own if they wanna, but they are still separate instances organizationally and logically, as they should.
After all, if that was not the case, Lemmy would be a ripe space for cybersquatting and "domain" hijacking. I could just go to a random server, or spin my own in just 30 minutes, create [email protected] and BAM! Now PineapplePizza is granted to me across the entire Fediverse. I become the ultimate master.
Sometimes the analogy to email is used. [email protected] does not need to be the same user (and authority) as [email protected] ; in fact, the entire system relies on the expectation that they "should" not be the same.
This is actually the biggest hurdle, if that's the right word, or obstacle that will prevent Lemmy from becoming an actual viable replacement for reddit. As it stands, it's basically just like you're using one app to browse a ton of random individual forum based websites with no real integration/interaction between them. And you have to search for the specific stuff you want to see. It's just a mess.
Yeah I agree, at least the top 100 communities need to be synced across all instances or something. It's not easy for someone to find content in their first hour here.
It would be nice if, when signing up to an instance, you are auto-subbed to a bunch of communities of that instance's choosing, even if not all of those communities are on that instance.
Yeah there's a lot of work needed to make the new user's experience better.
Both @Otome-chan and @Falmarri are correct. If you are interested in reading more, there is further discussion on that topic here: How do identical communities work on Lemmy?
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