• duckington@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    The way it works is that there’s not one lemmy site, there’s many different sites, or “instances” that people can host on their own servers—lemmy.world and lemm.ee are two of these. The catch is that they are “federated”, meaning that a user in one instance can see, vote on, comment on, etc posts from another instance. That’s why you can be on lemmy.world and see posts from !memes@lemme.ml. So if lemmy.world goes down it’s as simply as typing in another instance to your address bar :^)

    • eestileib@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      However, all the communities hosted on lemmy.world will be inaccessible while it is down. If you really only care to look at one of those at a particular moment, lemmy might as well be down for you.

      • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        They’ll still be accessible, since instances store local copies of data from servers that they’re federated. Your interactions with those communities will be invisible to anyone outside your own instance until the instance hosting the community comes back up, though.