I understand that a user on any instance can subscribe to any community in the fediverse, but I have been a bit confused when searching for communities to join. Sometimes there are communities on different instances, with the exact same name.

  • Do these communities talk to each other at all, or are they completely separate, with a different host, posts, mods, subscribers etc.

  • Should I just join the largest (and presumably, most active) one?

  • Is there anything in place to discourage communities of same name, but different instances, from “competing”?

  • ritswd@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 year ago

    Lemmy’s decentralization is a lot like email. So, they’re as similar as a “mickeyclub2023@gmail.com” mailing list and a “mickeyclub2023@hotmail.com” mailing list. So, completely separate, since they live on different services.

    And just like public mailing lists, you can join both if you like both, join only one if you like only one, or join none if you like none. It really isn’t more complicated than that.