Can one simply create an arbitrary community on any lemmy instance? I wonder how lemmy handles multiple communities of the same name, across multiple instances.
yeah, that’s kind of an issue. Many communities exist more than once on multiple instances. Then again, this can also be a benefit. Maybe one of them isn’t to your liking -> choose another one. Or one of them goes down -> there’s a backup.
They’re separate but you can connect to communities across instances. I would recommend posting to !newcommunities@lemmy.world to give it some attention so others are aware it exists.
Sorry, connecting might be a bad way to explaining it. You can access communities on other Lemmy instances (as long as they’re federated together, which they probably are).
Can one simply create an arbitrary community on any lemmy instance? I wonder how lemmy handles multiple communities of the same name, across multiple instances.
yeah, that’s kind of an issue. Many communities exist more than once on multiple instances. Then again, this can also be a benefit. Maybe one of them isn’t to your liking -> choose another one. Or one of them goes down -> there’s a backup.
They’re separate but you can connect to communities across instances. I would recommend posting to !newcommunities@lemmy.world to give it some attention so others are aware it exists.
What does connecting them do?
Sorry, connecting might be a bad way to explaining it. You can access communities on other Lemmy instances (as long as they’re federated together, which they probably are).
lemmy handles it like email does. The full community name (like your username) has the domain included.
So you can have showerthoughts@lemmy.world and showerthoughts@lemm.ee, and those are totally separate communities.
The same way Reddit handled communities that had nearly identical or similar topics:
One gets popular, the other doesn’t.