this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Something I haven't been able to wrap my head around, do I need a username on each instance for federated instances? If not, how does one participate in communities in other instances? I'm with lemmy.ml, but if I want to interact with a post on beehaw, how do I do that?
I think it works like this: each account belongs to an instance which is your home instance. You can go to other instances to interact with their communities, but your profile (where your history is) is on your home instance. The only difference Iβve notice is that, posting on your home instance then your post is just username, but on away instances itβs username@homeinstance. Otherwise it seems to work the exact same as interacting with communities on your home instance. But Iβve only just signed up so I am making guessing!
The short answer is no, you dont.
Think of this like email, you sign up to a mail provider (gmail, yahoo, fastmail, etc) or even if you're feeling up to it run you own email server with you own domain. You can then use that account to send emails to anyone regardless of which provider they picked and anyone can send you email too.
Lemmy (and ActivityPub, the underlying protocol) works the same. ActivityPub under the hood even uses the same concept of an inbox and outbox. You pick your provider and you can comment, post, etc. to anywhere regardless of which instance the other users or community is on.
If you see a post on another instance (e.g. Beehaw) you can just comment in the webui or app and it'll just work.
But if I want to subscribe to an instance on beehaw or kbin I need to have an account for those correct?
Nope, you only need one account. It works like email, it dosn't matter if you're on gmail, yahoo or fastmail, you can still send and receive emails from other providers. You can subscribe to communities on other instances and post comments or submit new posts regardless of which instance the community is on.
well, almost... your account can only see what its instance lets you, eg from where i'm posting from (lemmy.ml) i can see things on lemmygrad.ml but many instances, including the one you're on sh.itjust.works, have blocked them.
Thanks for the reply, I think I got it now. What confused me was the "it's like email" part. I understand I can send to/receive from yahoo, AOL etc. But I can't log into them with my Gmail. So I was thinking I would need a sing-in for beehaw and others.
I'm wondering, does ActivityPub have a way to delete content such that the deletion is propagated to other instances?
Yeah it does, when you delete some content it creates a "delete" activity which is sent out to all the servers that content was shared with. Those instances should remove the content on their side too, of course there is no way to ensure the content that has been shared is deleted, but activitypub does have a mechanism to delete content that has been federated.
Here's a howto https://lemmy.ml/comment/459391
That's helpful, thank you!
You only need one username for each group of federated servers/instances. Click Communities at the top, then click All under List of communities. that should list all communities known to lemmy.ml. If a community is not known, you would need to search for it (eg. Technology@beehaw.org).