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?

  • Ghost_Seeker69@sh.itjust.works
    5·
    2 years ago

    Load distribution. Different Lemmy instances are run by different volunteers who can only put so much money into them. So if lots of volunteers put up their own instances, then ideally each instance could have a few users signed up and thanks to federation, they’ll all be interconnected.

    • foxtrot@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      2 years ago

      Thanks, interesting point. I guess if the load is distributed enough, we won’t have Lemmy devs asking for donations to keep the servers running under bigger and bigger loads 👍🏼

      • Ghost_Seeker69@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        2 years ago

        Another interesting thing I realised: In a centralised network like Reddit, if the site goes down, nothing is accessible. But if a Lemmy instance goes down, most, if not all communities you’re subbed to should still be up given they aren’t hosted in that instance.

        • NorthWestWind@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 years ago

          It depends of where the communities you’re subbed to are hosted. Like currently a lot of communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. If it goes down a lot of communities will still be unavailable but you can still browse the rest.