So my understanding is that a community created on a certain server (say lemmy.world), can be interacted with by any other federated server, and any interactions from those servers are synced to the original “true” community / server. How does it work if two servers both have a community with the same name? Each server is the owner of content created there, and then Lemmy is just merging the communities with identical names so posts from both appear under server.com/c/Music?

/c/Music on server A could have drastically different rules from /c/Music on server B, so there’s potential for users on both to see posts that wouldn’t be allowed on their server?

  • ElSapo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Communities with the same name across different instances are not merged, and the way they are referenced will be different. So, the location of lemmy.world/c/Music can also be referenced as !music@lemmy.world while instead the Music at serverB.whatever be can be referenced as music@serverB.whatever .

    • Spacecraft@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      So when I see posts from a @someUser@some-server.com in lemmy.world/c/music, they had to visit lemmy.world and create a post in the music community here?

      • ElSapo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        No, the point of federation is that you can interact with other sites/servers from your own since the same protocol is shared. So from some-server.com they visited music@lemmy.world and did their interaction. The same way you can go to the Music community at lemmy.ml ( https://lemmy.world/c/music@lemmy.ml ) without leaving lemmy.world and without having to create a new account. Your comments and interaction will be seen without problems by users of lemmy.ml .

        • Spacecraft@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Awesome, makes perfect sense. And now I am seeing that I can search by All in the communities, and subscribe to all of the duplicates. Lemmy is friggin’ sweet! Thanks for the answers. I was not expecting so many replies so quickly!

      • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Not really, if someone from some-server join a .world community, that community is “copied” (cached) on some-server for all some-server users to use.

        What happens is that people on some-server modify their local copy, then the copy is merged into the original on lemmy.world.