I think having different communities for the same topics could be interesting and a good feature. No reason why subscribing to multiple version of "gaming" for instance couldn't be just as easy, and could allow for variations in rules and type of content posted.
Lemmy
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
Keep in mind that this limitation only on beehaw.org
Other Lemmy instances such as allow you to create communities freely. For example lemmy.ml or sopuli.xyz
The way federation works is that as a user of one instance you can read posts and comment from and to any other instance. That is how I can reply to this post even though my account is on lemmy.ml
What is not federated yet is community creation. Currently you can only create a community on an instance you have an account in and it so happens that beehaw on which you are has community creation disabled.
The idea is that it should not matter too much which instance you join, but you'll find a few differences between instances such as the ability to create a community or not, the existence of downvotes, etc...
That makes everything clearer. I see now that instances can be created with completely different rules (i had already noticed the "no downvotes" option) Thank you for that.
It's great to have all this different flavours in the save universe.
My next inquiry will be about clicking that colored symbol (maybe a fediverse icon?!) and being taken to a mastodon page. That really confused me. Especially because I'm also on mastodon, with the same username but the two accounts (lemmy/beehaw and mastodon) are not connected... It's really confusing for me.
Lemmy and Mastodon can talk to each other, not fully but especially Mastodon can see and write to Lemmy communities (although posts are ordered by publishing date since it can't understand upvotes). What the icon does is show you a comment or post on the original instance it was sent from.
If a Mastodon user sends a comment to Lemmy that icon will link to the same post but as seen on the original instance it was sent from.