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

  • RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninjaEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • rufus@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      12·
      1 year ago

      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.)

      • KonaKoder@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        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?

        • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
          1·
          1 year ago

          they are federated. you cannot only see all those communities, despite them being on various different servers, you can join and access all of them from each and every server. And the content gets sent through the network. As a user you can practically ignore the server part of a community. In this case it is important, in order to distinguish those communities because people created the community with the same name multiple times on multiple servers.