MicroWaveLemmy's total users continues to soar from 240k yesterday to 360k today! Basically quadrupling in the past 4 days
OmgarmI wonder how many people have accidentally signed up for more lemmy instances before they realized that wasn't needed.
I'm still not sure what an instance is but I'll sign up to some more of them if I can get more content.
An instance is just the word people use on the Fediverse for "Fediverse website". It's often preceded by the name of the platform the website is running, eg "Lemmy instance" or "Mastodon instance".
It's kind of like saying "WordPress website".
Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.one, Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ca, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, etc are all different websites running Lemmy, so they're Lemmy instances. Mastodon.social, mstdn.social, Mastodon.world, tenforward.social, etc. Are all just different websites running Mastodon.
Fediverse websites have the ability to request and mirror content in an ongoing manner from users or groups (which is what a Lemmy community is, a Fediverse group managed by a Lemmy server) on other Fediverse websites. From other "instances". This gives an imperfect illusion of everyone being in the same place, when we're actually spread across a dozen (or over 10,000,of you count the entire Fediverse) websites or more.