Is it possible to directly post to a Lemmy instance with your domain name?
Is it possible to directly post to a Lemmy instance with your domain name?
My idea is this: I just want to send to a server like this a request from my domain name and username, but I don't want to run a full instance. Is this technically possible?
There are APIs that you can use to post and comment, etc... But there has to be an instance at that domain.
That's how most of the mobile apps work btw, they just send a network request direct to lemmy.world etc... Saying that iopq wants to create a post with this title and this content....
But there's no need for your own personal domain name in this scenario, you just need an account on the server that you're trying to post or comment to.
Not sure if that helps.
Why does there have to be an instance there? Who checks that?
So you can't just send data from a domain. There has to be a service running behind that domain name to do something.
Without a server, it'd be like asking "why do I need tires on my car?". Well it's not going to go anywhere without them.
Now this could be a private instance with only you as the single user. And it could federated with the rest of the fediverse. But you still have to run some software to do that.
Now in theory someone I guess could come up with a slim version of Lemmy that only has a single user, and you can't post or comment directly to that instance but again something has to be running on a server behind that domain.
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.
Why not join an instance in this case? Let someone else handle running the instance and you post from whatever client you'd like?
AT Protocol can do this in the way of DNS DIDs, but ActivityPub doesn't have this functionality.
You can interact here from other ActivityPub-supporting codebases so you could just run one of the minimal microblogging sites. You wouldn't get the same experience as being a Lemmy instance though.
Yeah, if you're interested in learning things like server maintenance or docker you could absolutely spin up your own instance. Working on that myself right now, just gotta get the time to configure properly since I don't want bots finding and getting in through it. Definitely more work than it's probably worth though unless you're interested in that.
Why not set up a full instance and make it invite only?