I like that Lemmy can post on other instances (communities on other instances), but thinking about it, would that not present a potential issue with centralizing information about a topic on one instance?
I know it’s kind of similar to having themed Mastodon instances (and I also don’t really understand those), but it seems like a potential issue?
I know multiple instances can have the same communities, but that then seems like fracturing the conversation?
Could this just be due to my limited knowledge/use of the fediverse?
So, while a given community is overseen from a host instance, the actual content you’re reading isn’t. By subscribing to a community, the content there gets delivered to the instance you’re on, creating a local mirror.
On Mastodon and the other microblogging platforms, this subscription is done on the user level. If one person on your instance subscribes to a user on another instance, that users’ posts are available to everyone on your local site. Here? I’m not totally sure at what level content gets shunted and shared around.
But it’s definitely not centralized. You’re not reading posts on other websites. You’re just reading posts from other websites.
Oh yes, right, that is how it works with subscribing to a community.
Though, if I’m on my instance, and select a community from another instance to post in, the post ends up on that community and I have a copy of it (it seems, that’s what I did in this case).
Another comment mentions that if the community went away, I’d still have a copy of the content, which is interesting, though not entirely useful for picking up where the original community left off?