Imagine if now every subreddit would be located on its own server, not somewhere in a Reddit headquarters. So r/funny is now running on server with address my-server123.com and thus have address my-server123.com/r/funny. r/europe is now running on eu.gov and thus have address eu.gov/r/europe. etc. Good, but lets say I want to create a subreddit r/myFavoriteYoutuber but I don’t have a server. No problem, I contact people at r/funny and they allow my subreddit to run on their server, so its address will be my-server123.com/r/myFavoriteYoutuber. The “my-server123.com” and “eu.gov” is what we’d call an instance.
You might say - ok but I don’t care about instances, servers and whatnot. Also now instead of one Reddit website, we have thousands of them! Do I need to register everywhere? I don’t want this, I just want to to come to Reddit and browse stuff from everywhere!
… and this is possible! Instances can communicate with eachother so with account on one instance you can connect (not login) to all the instances you want. Basically your browser or smartphone app just now needs to download posts from different servers instead of one giant Reddit server. But it needs your help, you need to specify the address of the instance otherwise it doesn’t know where to connect. This is the same as email, if you want to send an email to John Smith, you don’t just write recipient as john.smith, you need to write the server also so john.smith@gmail.com
So if I take the example from previous comment, you cannot just write that you want subscribe to r/funny because your app or browser doesn’t know where the r/funny is. You’d need to write funny@my-server123.com or europe@eu.gov. And voila, that’s basically Lemmy
No, that’s actually the beauty of it all.
Imagine if now every subreddit would be located on its own server, not somewhere in a Reddit headquarters. So r/funny is now running on server with address my-server123.com and thus have address my-server123.com/r/funny. r/europe is now running on eu.gov and thus have address eu.gov/r/europe. etc. Good, but lets say I want to create a subreddit r/myFavoriteYoutuber but I don’t have a server. No problem, I contact people at r/funny and they allow my subreddit to run on their server, so its address will be my-server123.com/r/myFavoriteYoutuber. The “my-server123.com” and “eu.gov” is what we’d call an instance.
I write some extended explanation after lunch :)
This has some pros and cons:
You might say - ok but I don’t care about instances, servers and whatnot. Also now instead of one Reddit website, we have thousands of them! Do I need to register everywhere? I don’t want this, I just want to to come to Reddit and browse stuff from everywhere!
… and this is possible! Instances can communicate with eachother so with account on one instance you can connect (not login) to all the instances you want. Basically your browser or smartphone app just now needs to download posts from different servers instead of one giant Reddit server. But it needs your help, you need to specify the address of the instance otherwise it doesn’t know where to connect. This is the same as email, if you want to send an email to John Smith, you don’t just write recipient as john.smith, you need to write the server also so john.smith@gmail.com
So if I take the example from previous comment, you cannot just write that you want subscribe to r/funny because your app or browser doesn’t know where the r/funny is. You’d need to write funny@my-server123.com or europe@eu.gov. And voila, that’s basically Lemmy