#Lemmy is essentially Federated Reddit. A little rocky at the moment (few servers, low user count) but things have improved dramatically in just the last day. Subreddit -> community. And Lemmy/Kbin instances relay community content (posts/threads, comments) like IRC used to.
All the popular subs have been replicated and have been exploding in new users and content today for the obvious reason.

This is interesting. So I see people talking about Lemmy and Kbin. What I'm seeing from what you're saying is they are interoperable? What I don't want is a community that forms and grows on one federated platform, but a similar community grows on another, and there is no cross communication at all. Basically that's how Facebook operates.

Know what you mean. As far as I know Kbin speaks Lemmy natively. Masto, Calkey etc speak Lemmy-ish. But the whole concept of a Community aka sub is federated.

Specifically in the context of Lemmy/Kbin/Freindica (also speaks community afaik) communities span instances. So, while AskLemmy may be "homed" on lemmy.ml (the dev site), it shows up on lemmy.ca (my instance). My posts to AskLemmy propagate, and remote comments propagate back.

Don't know what happens if two federated Lemmy instances try creating the same Community at the same time, but so far everything else appears to be working ok (I literally created my Lemmy account today so Im still poking and prodding)

@Third spruce tree on the left @Roy Greenhilt Nothing will happen... There will be two separate communities with similar themes. On the current instances of lemmy this is the case. Occasionally someone from one will share some posts in the other. And the rest of the fediverse can subscribe/comment to both if they want.