Okay so expanding this analogy, I can email anyone including myself (posting to my own instance), and everyone can reply all at any time? Or am I slightly off?
No that’s correct. Slight deviation from email is that email is unicast - you send email to one person (and if you have multiple recepients it gets copied that many times). On lemmy the code on instances does something more like a optimized broadcast when you post to your own instance when someone is subscribed to a community on your instance.
It works like email. All instances talk in the background between each other.
Okay so expanding this analogy, I can email anyone including myself (posting to my own instance), and everyone can reply all at any time? Or am I slightly off?
No that’s correct. Slight deviation from email is that email is unicast - you send email to one person (and if you have multiple recepients it gets copied that many times). On lemmy the code on instances does something more like a optimized broadcast when you post to your own instance when someone is subscribed to a community on your instance.