this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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An instance contains a database that stores usernames, what users are subscribed to, and more.
It also contains code that requests data like posts, upvotes, links to images, etc. When you post something from your instance at your domain on a community on lemmy.world, your instance sends that post to lemmy.world and also watches that post so you'll be notified of replies, upvotes, etc.
This is the "federation" that makes Lemmy work, and all instances that have users who interact with other users on other instances do it. So the answer to the question "who checks that" is: your instance and every other instance anyone on your instance interacts with.
Simply subscribing to a community from your instance is also part of federation, because you're requesting data from other instances. These other instances require an address to deliver the data to, in the same way the postal service cannot deliver your mail without an address.
An instance is basically all the stuff that allows you to do the things you want to do on Lemmy. If you don't want to set up an account on someone else's server, you'll need to do it yourself.
This is the easiest method I've found to set up an instance: https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
You will need a Linux server and know how to update, configure and secure it, and you will need to know how to point your domain name at your server via DNS A record.
If you can do those things, you can get a Lemmy instance up and running with that script in a few minutes.
Let's say I just sent a request from my non-existent server with my user id, and just every time I wanted to check whether I got replies I would query the other server (which a Lemmy server would do to get notifications about replies or upvotes)
If I subscribe to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml I could just... check !asklemmy@lemmy.ml without actually loading any data to a server, I could just literally load it from lemmy.ml
I COULD host an instance, but why bother to store that data if I'm only going to be using it myself?
Who or what is going to send this request if not some server that implements ActivityPub? This could be a Lemmy or Mastodon or Kbin instance... Or anything else that implements ActivityPub.
ActivityPub works via pushes. So there's nothing to query. There HAS to be some server for it to send and store that data.
Me, directly
Great, this is what I wanted to find out, so there has to be something listening for pushes
Not just listening, but also sending. Your instance also needs to be able to send your stuff elsewhere.
Yes, I now understand I need to have a server listening for the notifications being pushed to me
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !asklemmy@lemmy.ml, !asklemmy@lemmy.ml