does lemmy have a chat and dms like reddit?

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/64812394

does lemmy have a chat and dms like reddit? - Divisions by zero

like can i send a dm to someone and talk to them here?

Yes. Click on any person’s username and under/next their bio there is a button to send a direct message. Not really a live chat thing yet, lemmy does not have the backend for that.

Note, DM’s over Lemmy are NOT encrypted, only obfuscated, any federated server can read the DM’s you send. Keep that in mind when choosing content to talk about.

Wait, what? It’s just the sender and receiver’s instances that can read the message; it’s not just any server right?
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.