this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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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.