Forgive me if this is truly a stupid question but I cannot find the answer and I have been afraid to ask.
Am attaching a screen shot to assist my babbling below.
When surfing thru the various communities (and please feel free to correct me if I use a wrong term here) I will see many that have the same name but only difference is that at the end of that name, there is an ‘@xyz.ca’ or similar.
I assumed these were just the same communities only started on different servers?
However I have seen several - like the one where my arrow points to that doesn’t have an ‘@‘ location at the end of it. Can someone explain to me the difference here? Thanks
I believe that indicates that particular community is "local" to the instance of Lemmy you're signed into. Since it is local they don't need to add the rest of the instance address for the community.
(So if you were logged into lemmy.world when you took the screenshot that would mean that is !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world)
I assumed these were just the same communities only started on different servers?
This is correct. Anyone can start a community on any Lemmy (Or KBin) server, and they can name it whatever they want. When a community is on a remote Lemmy instance, you see the @<instancename> suffix to help you see which one it is referring to. When no @<instancename> suffix is shown, that means that the community you are looking at is hosted on the instance that you are currently viewing Lemmy content through.
but it isn't the same communitiy. it's a completely different community on a different server, only with the same name. (and an omitted server name means it's on the one you're currently at.)
So is the idea that a community coalesces to a winner-takes-all single server, or is there a way to... uh ... federate (?) ... same-theme communities from different servers?
Users and communities hosted on the instance you're viewing (in this case it's lemmy.world) don't show their home instance.
i.e. my name appears as just "bewilderedraven" to other lemmy.world users reading this but users logged into other instances (such as lemmy.ml) should see something like "@bewilderedraven@lemmy.world" the some applies to communities.
Lemmy is federated, so there are multiple "similar" communities on different instances. Here you are on lemmy.world if there isnt amy @ ... if there is something like @lemmy.ml it is on lemmy.ml. You can subscribe to them on every instance ( only if the instance is blocked ), comment and create posts there
Until someone on kbin subscribes to it via putting in the url directly it doesn't show up as kbin dose not know it exists iirc. Same thing with Lemmy, if someone on your instance isn't subscribed to a community on another instance then it doesn't show up until someone dose
Edit: Getting a 404 error when I try to go there to subscribe, as money_loo said its probably a backend issue with kbin
That’s a good question, I thought I understood how it works and had typed out a pretty long response before I tested it myself, and you’re right it doesn’t work between servers at all for some reason.
Normally you could search an instance up directly between servers and it would propagate, but kbin searches come up blank for your lemmy.world community.
Either kbin is blocking lemmy.world searches or they aren’t federating, or maybe it’s deeper and kbin can’t interact as cleanly with the Lemmyverse as we thought.