Yes.

And Redtea was correct, i meant World News community at lemmy, though lately with the reddit run nearly entire lemmy and all federated instances except lemmygrad filled to the brim with all manners of libs, ultras, anarchists etc.

Lemmy is an internet protocol, like Email. Just like anyone can start their own email server, anyone can start their own Lemmy "Instance".

An "Instance" is a website. It is wholly controlled by the people who run (or rent) the servers. "Lemmygrad.ml" is an instance. So is "Lemmy.world" and "Lemmy.ml"

Instances have Communities, which are like subreddits. But Instances can also "Federate" with each other, so you can see and comment on posts from your home instance on federated instances. This is why, when you're browsing Lemmygrad's front page with browsing set to "All" (instead of "Local" or "Subscribed"), you'll see posts from "asklemmy@lemmy.ml" or "Fediverse@lemmy.world".

The developers of the Lemmy protocol are Marxists. They run their own instance, lemmy.ml, but it is not an explicitly ideological instance like lemmygrad.ml. There is a Nazi instance, exploding-heads. Most major instances do not federate with them, except the shitty "free speech" ones. There is no way to prevent Nazis from using Lemmy, because no-one owns Lemmy. It would be like trying to prevent Nazis from using Email.

Lemmygrad federates with most instances, except porn instances and fascist instances. Many instances choose not to federate with Lemmygrad due to "Tankie" hysteria.

I'm no expert! But…

(Edit: yes, like Reddit but, crucially, it's not all part of one centralised system owned by one company. It's 'federated' and decentralised and on Lenmygrad, at least, there are no ads.)

It's software. Anyone can use the software to create an 'instance'. Each instance can talk to each other unless they block each other. Each instance is like a cluster of subreddits (called 'communities').

On your home feed you can sort by local and see all the communities in your cluster (instance). Or sort by subscribed and you can see all subscribed communities – it's possible to subscribe to communities on other instances. Or sort by 'all' and you can see all communities in all the instances that are 'federated' (i.e. the ones that haven't blocked each other).

There's a small catch. The communities that show up in 'all' only include those that other members of your instance have searched for from your instance. So the list grows over time and might not include every community that you can access.

Additionally, you can comment and post across instances, so long as your instance hasn't blocked the other one or the other way round.

Lemmy is software, a link aggregator so yes, like reddit. But it's not centrally hosted. Each instance is hosted separately by its own admins and functions like its own social media site with its users and communities. The various instances are federated which means that users can interact across those instances. Think of it kind of like how you can email anyone whether you have a gmail or yahoo mail account (except instead of emails, it's public posts like these).

The admins of the lemmy.ml instance also happen to be the developers of the entire software Lemmy and they are Marxists but anyone can use the software because its open-source and host their own instance. Most of the big instances are now filled with users from reddit most of which are libs.