Hey all. A bunch of seemingly ex Superstonkers or something have descended on Lemmy. I’ve held GME and Superstonk on Lemmy World since the Reddit APIocalypse five months ago.
Who are you guys and why is there a sudden influx? I was wondering when you’d show up and why it never happened in July (I was the only one).
It's a great question and you aren't doing anything wrong.
The answer is: no, you do not need a separate account for each instance.
Lemmy is great and I love it but it is not as beginner friendly as it could be and not as seamless as it could be. I believe in due time it will get better, but regardless we're working with what we've got.
Anyone on any instance can participate and interact with anyone else or any other community on any other instance. Once you've subscribed to a few communities (on Lemmy, "subreddits" are called communities) on various instances, then it's easy to find that content under your Subscribed feed. But finding those communities initially can be tricky sometimes.
My account is on the instance hosted at lemmy.whynotdrs.org, whereas your account is on the instance hosted at lemmy.world.
I am replying to you from my home instance, from this post . It's the same post that you are currently seeing and participating in, but your are seeing the post through your instance.
If the server that is hosting lemmy.whynotdrs.org suddenly stopped working, I would no longer have access to my account or any of the content hosted on that instance, whereas you would still be able to use Lemmy because your account is available on a different server hosting lemmy.world.
Anyone on any instance can participate and interact with anyone else or any other community on any other instance.
Except, if for example, one server blocks another server, which sometimes happens when one server is hosting types of content that other servers are not okay with, or if one server is particularly belligerent then other instance admins may tend to block those ones. In which case, if there is a block between two instances then you would not be able to interact with a person on that blocked instance.
Thank you for the info! Wow. So in the example you gave...would all of your comments on different communities vanish and I would not be able to see them if your home instance went down?
No, the comments would not disappear. So long as a copy of the content is hosted on your instance, you'll have access to it. For example if a thread originates from a community on your instance, e.g. this thread we're in, and I make these comments here, and my home server went down, you should still be able to see and interact with all of my comments here.