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?