First off, better late than never: Happy Halloween!
Sorry we've been a bit quiet lately. But we love you, promises given! We're just working on a lot of things, and most of us are very busy with their daily lives lately. We'll be back with you to announce some of our projects tomorrow. <3
Lately, and gladly, here's a grand thanks to @canthidium@lemmy.world for giving us an amazing Halloween icon!
You could read a long explanation, if you'd like, but the email analogy also somewhat works.
In the same way you can email someone with another email address, you can write messages on a community on another instance. They "federate" posts together.
IMO, unless you care about federation, which the average person doesn't, that's all you really need to know.
There is no magic, the servers just send it to each other.
So you send your post to LW, they store it and show it on their website. But they also send it to all the other Fediverse servers they are connected to (aka "federated with"), so those can also show it to their users. The same thing happens when a post is updated or deleted, or when new votes come in. The servers just send each other messages about what changed, so they can all act accordingly.
I understand subreddits, and I understand servers. I know lemmy is like multiple different servers with multiple different subreddits in each server.
What I don't understand.
What server am I in? And how does that impact my ability to interact with other servers? Should I even care about what server I'm in? Are there things currently hidden from me on Lemmy depending on which server I originally selected?