Service layer multicast communications management may be achieved via indication by entities of multicast capabilities during service layer registration and self-subscription by the entities to the service layer. The service layer, or a managing application in communication with the service layer, may then maintain resources for multicast configurations, dynamically create multicast groups, and notify members via their self-subscription of the entities in the groups. The service layer may then further fan-out multicast messages, thereby allowing the originator of the multicast message to access recipients in multiple underlying networks without the need to configure communications directly. Fan-out may include unicasts to entities lacking multicast capabilities. Self-subscription may also be used, for example, in granting access control to a third party application.