So there are way more competent, tech-savvy users than me, so I consider myself a layman.
From my understanding is that ActivityPub is basically a foundational, basic level of computer/program coding.
This foundational level of coding tells/ guides software and programs built on top how to communicate with other software built on top, even if the programs have different functions and purposes (e.g. lemmy and mastodon and pixelfield)
So by using a program built using ActivityPub, you can basically use that program to talk, communicate, interact, with a different program built using ActivityPub.
By using lemm.ee (a lemmy instance) you are able to use, post, see and interact with other instances for lemmy as well as other ActivityPub programs like mastodon (foss Twitter) or k/mbin.
So by using lemmy you are using ActivityPub. You can expand your ActivityPub usage by using other ActivityPub programs like pixelfield, mastodon, etc, but theoretically, you should only need one ActivityPub account
That is a fantastic explanation. You mentioned that I need one Activity Pub account. Who actually provides it? Right now I have accounts in lemm.ee and I think another instance. Is there a different account I need to setup? Thank you.
Your lemm.ee account would be considered an ActivityPub account. However at this point, due to multiple factors such as instance blocking and the fact that we are still in the infancy of ActivityPub services, you probably will still need to have multiple accounts across different ActivityPub programs.
The proper way would be to probably make an API client that logs in to each of these accounts, queries the list of subscribed communities, and unfollows each community. But I’m not even sure the backend deals with all this correctly… I’m working on additional testing to validate the backend behavior.
I don’t really want to spend resources on fetching new posts and updates.
As you have discovered, your instance is not initiating a “fetch”, it is actually the other servers sending to you. Those other instances have your now-gone users (on your server) still subscribed to the communities.
Short of defederating, you have to get the other servers to remove your subscribers to those communities, or at least unsubscribe. This kind of thing is currently not trivial to do, likely requires new code or direct SQL statements for those other servers to execute.
I am actively working on testing code to try and reproduce what happens in these situations when a remote server does not unsubscribe from communities. Doing a direct SQL delete of rows from the persons table is perhaps out of scope, but there is a lot of cleanup. There was an explosion of instances (new servers) out there and many have since gone offline. So I am sure the the topic of how to clean up old orphan data will keep coming up.
A lot going on right now regarding federation consistency between servers, so not sure, it’s scattered on a variety of topics. You are welcome to comment reply to me every few days if you are curious.
I have removed a couple of bot users from my Lemmy instance via DB query (I removed them from person table)
If I understand, you still have them in your local_user database table? I’m not sure if they would still be matched up records of local_user to person with a delete from person table.
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