Okay so expanding this analogy, I can email anyone including myself (posting to my own instance), and everyone can reply all at any time? Or am I slightly off?
No that’s correct. Slight deviation from email is that email is unicast - you send email to one person (and if you have multiple recepients it gets copied that many times). On lemmy the code on instances does something more like a optimized broadcast when you post to your own instance when someone is subscribed to a community on your instance.
@sting here’s me trying to figure out how activity pub works. https://beehaw.org/comment/188913.
The entire thread that follows is very useful for understanding how this works, in a simple way.
I still haven’t quite figured out how this works but here is a comment from a completely unrelated instance!
It works like email. All instances talk in the background between each other.
Okay so expanding this analogy, I can email anyone including myself (posting to my own instance), and everyone can reply all at any time? Or am I slightly off?
No that’s correct. Slight deviation from email is that email is unicast - you send email to one person (and if you have multiple recepients it gets copied that many times). On lemmy the code on instances does something more like a optimized broadcast when you post to your own instance when someone is subscribed to a community on your instance.
@sting here’s me trying to figure out how activity pub works. https://beehaw.org/comment/188913.
The entire thread that follows is very useful for understanding how this works, in a simple way.
Edit: markdown wasn’t working.