this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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I am new to the Fediverse. I vaguely understand how Lemmy instances broadcast content to each other, but I was surprised to find Lemmy communities on kbin. How does that work? (feddit.uk)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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And it also seems that mastodon can also be "syndicated" to these other communities, and vice versa? Is that true?

Are there limitations to any of this?

Apologies if this is not the perfect place to ask this question. I'm a lost old man. :-)

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy, kbin, and Mastodon all speak the same underlying protocol -- ActivityPub. I've found that the best way to think of it is to compare it to email. If I send you an email from my gmail account to your outlook account, it just works (well, mostly, email is a bit of a mess lol) even though the two email clients look vastly different from each other. ActivityPub (and federated protocols in general) are like email, but for twitter/reddit.

There are some different message types (it wouldn't make sense to present twitter-like content in the context of a threaded forum like Reddit), and not all instance types support all the different message types. I'm using kbin (via kbin.social) and I can see Mastodon content, but I'm not sure if Lemmy has that ability.

Not sure if that was helpful, and I hope that others come and fact check me, but that's my understanding of it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. I didn't know they spoke the same underlying protocol.
For fun and experimentation, I'm answering you from my Kbin account. I feel like a kid in a candy store playing with this new technology. Maybe Reddit's suicide-by-greed is not entirely a bad thing.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

What is really cool is that you can mix and match features, like if you follow a Mastodon user on Misskey and vice versa, the Mastodon user can see the Misskey users full 5000 character post, even though Mastodon is limited to 500 chars.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

All fediverse software (lemmy, kin, mastodon, etc) implements their own version of ActivityPub in slightly different ways. There are cases where the overlap is enough to cross over (lemmy communities and kbin magazines), and some where it doesn't work/is wonky (lemmy users can't follow mastodon users).

There's a more in depth write up here if you're curious: https://overengineer.dev/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-thoughts-one-year-later.html

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes, that is one of the features of being federated. Kbin and Lemmy and Mastadon (and others) can all federate with each other, so posts and comments are all shared. It doesn't really matter if you're on Kbin or Lemmy, you can see the same communities/magazines and comments for the most part, and interact regardless of which one you are currently logged in to.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, my understanding is that email is federated, and SMS text messages are federated, but it isn't easy to email a phone number, or send a text to someone's email. So I'm surprised that Kbin and Lemmy can talk to each other.

But I see someone else answered that Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon all speak the same underlying protocol, ActivityPub. Now it's starting to make sense.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think your example of email and SMS messages is a good analogy... Just because they can talk to each other doesn't mean the presentation is always correct. For example I'm on Lemmy, and I have seen replies by people on Mastodon in these threads. However the Mastodon replies have a different formatting so you will see the leading @user1 @user2 types stuff on those replies which really stands out when you're reading from a threaded interface. And I can't imagine how you would navigate through a lemmy/kbin post while using Mastodon.

So yes, you could get to everything from a single user account, but I find it better to still have different accounts on Lemmy and Mastodon just to make it easier to view things in the intended presentation method. Maybe some day there will be flags embedded in each post so that one interface knows how to properly format what you are reading, we're just not there yet.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

@GoodKingElliot

I'm answering your post from kbin, you can see Lemmy instances and communities from Kbin!

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Then wait until you find that you can follow Lemmy/kbin communities from Mastodon and comment on Lemmy/kbin posts from your Mastodon account ๐Ÿคญ

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

how do you do this?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Search for the user/community name you want.