You may be new to Lemmy and wondering what it’s all about.

Prefer a video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6xCw9zb5kw

Lemmy is part of the Fediverse, a network of interconnected social media platforms. Lemmy is intended to work like Reddit, but instead of one central site, there is no central site. Instead, there are many different sites (nodes) that talk to each other.

Think of this like email. No one “owns” email. Instead, there are many email servers. Some are large, like Gmail. Some are smaller, like the email server that runs email at your work. And some people run their own email server, just for themselves.

Even though there are many different sites providing email, it does not matter which one you pick. For the most part, any email provider you choose can email any other.

Federated sites work the same way. Lemmy.nz is one site, Lemmy.ml is another. Beehaw.org is yet another. There are many different Lemmy sites, large and small. All these sites have their own users, they have their own communities (subreddits), and they all connect to each other. If you want to view posts on asklemmy on Lemmy.ml, you can subscribe. It doesn’t matter which server you signed up to. You can comment on posts, upvote posts, the whole shebang. Regardless of which server you signed up to, you can seamlessly interact with posts, comments, and upvotes across the entire network.

Hopefully this answers more questions than it raises, but really it could go either way. Reply to this post if you have questions (regardless of which server you signed up to).

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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    1 year ago

    This is confusing to me. So if I created my account on this instance and I want to see posts and comment on posts from Beehaw.org. Do I need to create a different account on that instance? If so how do I link it all together?

    Edit: I figured it out. This was a great video that explained it in 5mins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6xCw9zb5kw

    • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
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      1 year ago

      Thanks for posting this! I’ll add the video in some places for people that prefer video.

      For others: the answer is no you don’t need another account, you can subscribe to beehaw communities from lemmy.nz, and can find these in the Communities page, you just need to click the “All” tab.