We have Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, I think even yiffit.net. If I log in using wefwef it asks me where I want to login. And when I make a new account using another instance, it says ”… Lemmy is federated, so you can interact with everything on lemmy.ml even if you’re registered on a different instance.“ So if I’m registered on lemmy.world, how can I interact with lemmy.ml?
Think of them as different email servers. It’s all federated and connected. As long as you’re looking at the “all” timeline it will show you posts from across every instance. And you can follow communities across instances. For example I’m on a different instance than you but I can see your post and comment on it. Just start subscribing to some. check out the list below for a couple migrated subreddits.
https://www.quippd.com/writing/2023/06/15/unofficial-subreddit-migration-list-lemmy-kbin-etc.html
This “It’s just like email” makes no sense at all to me. My email is nothing like Lemmy. It is the most confusing description I have ever heard.
It is “just like email” in a sense you can send email from your gmail to someone using yahoo, hotmail or even their own self hosted server and it still gets delivered despite all those different servers. And that’s where analogy of similarity to email ends.
You have a gmail address. Your friend has a yahoo address. Your other friend has an outlook address.
It doesn’t matter at all because they all work together. That’s what they mean
But I can’t read any of their emails so it isn’t like email at all.
But if you both subscribe to the same mailing list you will both receive the same message.
I’m confident that “mailing lists” are not a thing most people will know about or understand today, and for a lot of people “email” and “gmail” are completely synonymous terms. A lot of people will have never interacted with an @yahoo account, I wasn’t aware they were even still in business.
But I can’t read any of their emails so it isn’t like email at all.
What part of the comparison confuses you?
I can’t think of how it is even close to the same as email other that both Lemmy and email use the @ symbol.
If I send an email to a friend, no one else can see it. That is a note between him and me. The comparison is perplexing.
The analogy isn’t meant to reflect who receives the message, but how communication interacts.
Each lemmy/federated instance uses a prefix and a suffix to create a name. So for example, I’m [email protected] here, where Melpomene is me and kbin.social is where I reside. This is similar to email because it works similarly… I might be Melpomene on Gmail, but my actual user name reflects both me (Melpomene) and the email instance I call home (gmail.com.)
If you want a specific analogy to messaging, though… when you send a message to a lemmy community, you’re basically responding to a distribution list. [email protected] is akin a distribution list, the distribution list is (technically) visible to anyone on the instance, so anyone can see the message. If you’re on a federated instance that allows private messages, though, sending to an individual user would still function like email in that only the person messaged would see it.
Edit: The comparison is not exact, granted. It’s meant to de-mystify the prefix/suffix format of federation, not to offer a one to one comparison to email.