this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Fediverse
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The fact that a message is addressed to a single person does not mean that it's only sent to that person. In theory, anyone following you will receive a notification about the message.
This is wrong, Lemmy doesnt send private messages to followers.
I wasn't talking about the specifics of Lemmy, but ActivityPub in general. You can not guarantee that just because a message has been addressed to a single actor that only that actor will see it.
If any Activitypub platform sends messages to an actor which they arent addressed to, thats clearly a bug.
In the most practical cases, yes. But in theory, there is nothing about the protocol that says that message addressing implies message visibility, or even access control.
Also, be careful of taking your assumptions and treating them as universal truths. One day somebody could build an IRC-like system on ActivityPub and decides to treat a "ChatMessage" object as public objects which may or may not be addressed at a single participant. There would be no "bug" if the server picks up the object, relays to others, or even indexes it and makes it searchable.