I am new and trying to understand how Lemmy works. I am posting this from my lemmy.world account, on a lemmy.ml community. It seems like you can read, post, subscribe to whatever community outside of the instance you’re registered with. So… Why register on lemmy.world vs lemmy.ml or any other instance, if all communities are accessible to everyone?
You can’t create communities on other instances seems to be the main difference. Also you could lose access to your account if your instance goes down
Thanks, it also looks like if I want to sub to a community on a different instance, I have to search for it from my own instance, as I can’t hit “subscribe” in the community list on another instance. Regarding losing access to your account, do people keep multiple accounts to avoid this? No idea how likely instances are to go down.
that’s due to the way information is populated, while your instance can see the content, it doesn’t actually know its there until you search for it which populates that data (in simple terms anyway)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s as if instances are countries and communities are cities. A state gets connected to a city of another state when someone decides to drive there (search it). When someone does that, it creates a street that both states can take (and so posts and comments from that community automatically get to the other instance).
Am I getting this right?