Is rust an MMORPG or is the game limited to small servers?

I can't find anything specifically talking about this. If I made an account and my friend made an account without any planning / server selection between the two of us, could we play together?

Solution 1:

It's not a massively multiplayer game but it does support high population servers (servers with 128+ players). This means you'd have to connect to a specific server if you wanted to play with your friend rather than always connecting to the same server by default.

While you can move between servers freely, all the items that you've gathered or stolen do not move with you, these are saved separately on each individual server.

Solution 2:

Rust is more a persistent "not so massive" MOFPS than a MMORPG. The population that a server can support varies between 64/128 (the most used) and 300+ depending on its bandwidth and computation performances.

Rust can be played in any of the hundreds (if not thousands) servers managed by the community. There are also some official servers hosted directly by game developers. Each server has its settings (and mods eventually) and all what you do (buildings, items, recipe studies) stay on that server and cannot be moved if you decide to start you adventure in another one.