General Discussion

12139 readers

190 users here now

Welcome to Lemmy.World General!

This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.

🪆 About Lemmy World

🧭 Finding Communities

Feel free to ask here or over in: [email protected]!

Also keep an eye on:

For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!

💬 Additional Discussion Focused Communities:

[email protected] - Note this is for more serious discussions.
[email protected] - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
[email protected] - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
[email protected] - Watched a movie and wanna talk to others about it? Here's a place to do so!
[email protected] - Want to talk politics apart from political news? Here's a community for that!

Rules

Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.

0. See: Rules for Users.

No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to [email protected] or [email protected] communities.
No Ads/Spamming.
No NSFW content.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

2010

We've grown an absolute shit ton of people the past day, insanely nuts to see how active World is. (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

454 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Whereas you signed up on lemmy.world, I signed up on lemmy.ca.

Our accounts live on these different instances of the same platform.

Someone else may have an account on sh.itjust.works.

Each of these instances can have communities (subreddit equivalent). Through federation (essentially agreement to talk with eachother). We (account holders on different instances) can interact, post and comment anywhere on these and other federated instances.

In a weird way, these instances are an adhoc load balancer since I am using resources primarily from lemmy.ca and you are using resources from lemmy.world. This last piece is most relevant to the potential issue stated. A good load balancer, balances the load efficiently and effectively. If everyone made an account on lemmy.world it would get an uneven share of the load and struggle to keep its infrastructure alive or scaled well. Additionally, it goes against the decentralized nature of federated instances.

Now please take this all with a grain of salt, I have been here since july 1 and so am taking the rough concept I've learned and tried to explain it. Likely missing critical technical details and the analogies may be imperfect. :)