this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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Fediverse
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I think the one thing that still confuses people is the concept of instances with platforms like Lemmy and Masto. It’s like there are multiple Reddits and Multiple Twitters, and what differentiates them confuses newbies.
What I don't understand is why I only see Lemmy content when browsing through Sync. If Mastodon is connected to the fediverse, how do I find that content?
Also, as far as I can tell, most of the fediverse is basically more like Reddit than anything else.
ATM, you can't. Normal mastodon posts are not understood by lemmy servers. They don't know how to handle content that is not associated with a community.
Most of the fediverse is like twitter. Users making posts to their own "microblogs"/profiles, following each other or browsing a timeline of all posts by everyone. That's mastodon, and it has by far the most activity.
Lemmy doesn't support profile posts, and you can't follow users, only communities.
Basically, all content on Lemmy is posted to groups, while all content on Mastodon is posted to the users own profiles. While the networks are technically connected, the content type is not compatible.
I hear mastodon is getting support for groups, though, which might be something that can be interoperable with lemmy communities. Then they could look at communities as if they were user groups, and post to them, and we could sub to mastodon user groups, and see their posts and feeds as if they were communities.
But until Lemmy implements support for "user" posts and "user" following, we won't see the majority of content of that type, coming from mastodon.
There's already some funky interoperability that comes from the underlying structure of communities kind of being user accounts, where mastodon users can follow Lemmy communities, and post to communities by mentioning them. But it's not pretty.
the Mastodon user has to do an @ tag for the community in their toot, so if @[email protected] is in their toot then it'll show up on that Lemmy community
Yeah, that's why Reddit was the only platform I ever got into. And now Lemmy.
Obviously a post on Lemmy will look like a Lemmy post, but the interoperability is kinda cursed when you look into how it actually ends up working.
Oh I'm not against the interoperability, the opposite, I want it to be better.
Comments do work.
Right now it's really convoluted and I've seen people accidentally post to lemmy while thinking they were just pinging a user, when it actually was a community.
And following communities from mastodon is a mess because they obviously then fill the feed with way more posts than a single person would. And they all look like they're posted by the user/community instead of the actual user that posted them TO that community. Not to mention they don't see votes and have to no good way to sort community content, except chronologically.
I happily follow users that make things. Artists, video producers, what have you. I don't want to miss any of their work. That said, not having user profiles wasn't a big deal on Reddit, you would just create a subreddit with your username and it worked fine.
If you put the mention at the top like Mastodon defaults it'll look very messy on Lemmy because it will be trying to insert a MD link in the title field. If the mansion and hashtags are placed at the bottom of the post instead though, the post will appear fine on Lemmy.
There are a few guides on how to create posts that are compliant, Basically it's like this:
[Title] separated by blank line [Body]
[Hashtags (optional)
[Community mention] *you can only mention one community and if you want the post to appear on Lemmy that Community should be the first mention. If you want to mention people on Mastodon their mentions must come after.
Biggest drawbacks currently are:
To be clear, the Fediverse doesn't mean that everything is interconnected. It means that everything can be interconnected, but most sites will only do a very minimal form of interconnectivity. And that's mainly due to personal choice. You wouldn't want to have Instagram posts on your Reddit feed, and you wouldn't want Tumblr posts on YouTube. You can do that, but why would you?
So most sites will only interconnect with other sites that they deem to be similar enough in content style. Lemmy interconnects with Kbin because both are Reddit clones. Kbin interconnects with Lemmy, but it also interconnects with Mastodon. Apparently the developer of Kbin thought that Mastodon is similar enough in content style that people would appreciate having Mastodon posts appear on Kbin. And this happens for all the other sites. The Fediverse is less like a tightly connected network, and more like a loose connection of sites that could operate together, if they ever chose to do so. Like a federation, if you will
Basically, if you're on Lemmy (which you are), you're only going to see Reddit-like content
You probably have seen posts in Lemmy communities from a mastadon user without realizing it.
lemmy is incapable of the 'microblog' part of the fediverse of which mastodon only uses. . there are other server apps, like kbin that allow you access to both.
i picked mbin precisely for this reason. plus it didnt look like someone forgot the css.
From what I understand, there are different content types in activity pub. Lemmy forces on viewing community groups, Masto focuses on individuals. Lemmy would need to build support for following an individual.
They underlying technology supports it, people just have to build a user experience for it, and that hasn’t been done yet.