Because Lemmy isn’t a website. It’s software that runs social content aggregation sites.

It’s like what WordPress is for blogs and other unidirectional content serving websites.

The fun thing is, though, that any website running Lemmy can share content posted to it with any other website running Lemmy.

It’s only confusing because corporate social media has taught us that “service = place”.

Same reason there are multiple phone companies. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Google Fi, Cricket Wireless, Mint Mobile, etc.

They all allow you to communicate with your friends no matter what provider they use. But the companies are all slightly different. You might choose one due to better coverage, or customer support, or corporate ethics, or simply cause a friend recommended it.

Phones are redundant. So if Verizon fails, you can always sign up for another provider and still talk to your friends. Or if you have a bad experience, you’re not stuck using something you hate.

Plus, if one company ruled all of phones, it would be a bad thing. Monopolies aren’t good.

Lemmy isn’t the only thing out there with ‘multiple websites’ online. Email - there is more than just gmail, outlook, yahoo, proton, etc.

It’s not confusing to you that there are multiple email companies, that all work together, right? You don’t need a gmail account to send a message to a gmail user.

So don’t think it Lemmy like a website owned by one company. It’s not. Just like nobody owns “email”. Think of it like a protocol.

But I get it. Lemmy is an emerging technology. People are expecting it to be new Reddit. And it is on the front end. But it’s closer to new email.

Because that’s the whole point of being decentralised. Nobody gets everything.

If there was just one “Lemmy”, we’d be back to another monolithic Reddit again.

There really needs to be a fediverse primer that everyone can read before signing up. It would make all this stuff clear.

That’s the basis of the whole system, they use the same protocol to communicate(activity pub) and share content.

It allows anyone to run their own version of reddit and they can decide which other servers they want to have content from