I’m not techy enough to understand how it works.
In: 3
Lemmy played bass like a madman, did tons of drugs and drink, and rocked the faces off millions of fans worldwide.
That’s the only Lemmy I know.
Lemmy is part of the Fediverse, like other apps like Mastodon are. I can only answer for Mastodon, but it should be similar for Lemmy.
Each Lemmy instance has its own list of “subreddit” and users. You can follow them/subscribe to them like you are used to.
Other instances have their own subreddit and users. From your viewpoint, they look like “subreddit at servername dot com”, like an email address. If you follow these subreddits, your Lemmy instance (where you created your account on) is aware of that, since you used its interface to follow content on the other instance, so it checks regularly via a specialized way of communication if there is new content for you, and shows it to you. It has now “federated” the other instance.
Since it now knows about the existence of the federated instance, it can also promote this instance to other users which have registered on the first instance, so that they can find and follow other subreddits on the federated instance as well. So, over time, a network of instances federating each other will continue to grow.
The neat part: the specialized way of communication to create the federation is well defined and in use by other software, not only Lemmy, but also Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Peertube, etc., so in theory you will be able to follow content on the other types of servers as well, but its up to your instance how it will display this content.
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