Not a stupid question at all!

Right now, lemmy.ml is the biggest Lemmy instance and the "flagship" site. There are several other Lemmy instances across the internet. They are all connected with each other - or "federated" - meaning each instance can see all of the posts of any instance it's federated with. Since every instance is federated with each other, you will get the same content no matter where your account is. So even though you are on lemmy.world, you can see everything that is posted to lemmy.ml.

Well one of the other questions I had was, I'm seeing things in my feed like Android, catpics, therewasanattempt, and they all "look" like subreddits. They don't look like different instances from what I can tell. So of course I've subscribed to them the same way I would on Reddit.

Is the concept of those the same as subreddits? Or are they just different instances? Or are they affiliated with lemmy.world? How does that even work? Hope that makes sense.

I'm pretty new here. I'd say the concept is the same in the sense that they are each their own community run by their own moderators. However, the all powerful Admins are those in control of the instance.

One interesting example is that Beehaw has started making "Bee themed" community icons which makes it easy to tell when you're looking at one of the communities hosted on their instance.

Someone on Lemmy.world could have another community with the exact same name, you just have to pay attention to the end (and having themed icons also helps).

But it goes even a little farther than that. We can end up with Mastadon (twitter equivalent) users who are also able to comment in these communities. I don't think its working in reverse yet (at least not for Lemmy.ml accounts).

See, the cool thing is that by that logic, if hypothetically speaking the admins of Lemmy.world did anything shady or unfriendly to the user, we could just move to another friendly instance without making another bullshit account or moving to a different website, or god forbid a different app.

Not that I think they would, as it's clear to me they can't given there's no actual company. But DAMN do I love options!

Could one move instances while retaining their own post / comment history? That’s the part that I’m unclear on (new reddit refugee here)