this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

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[–] [email protected] 104 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Reading this article got me to try out Lemmy again, and I'm pleasantly surprised.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 10 months ago

It’s a lovely place these days. Welcome back.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 10 months ago (2 children)

What app are you using? I highly recommend Voyager

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm using Sync. Makes me feel like I'm using the Relay for Reddit app back before Reddit forced them to charge for it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (5 children)

If you liked Relay, try Thunder. It has the dismiss read feature that made Relay my go-to. It's the only app I've seen that has it, maybe because I joined the dev team to add it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

As does Sync. At least on Android

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (5 children)

So it does! I didn't find it when I tried it, I guess.

But if one doesn't want to pay to rid Sync of ads, Thunder is an open source, free, actively developed alternative. It's still not feature complete, but I've been happily using it since I hopped over from reddit. And contributed a good few features myself, like user and community sidebars.

The next update will include my work on an indicator that shows if and how many new comments a post you've already visited has received since you last opened it (like in the webUI). And some other guys on the team have gotten notifications implemented.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Thank you for that!

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (9 children)

Been test running various Lemmy apps, I think Voyager is nice but for some reason it bothers me that I can’t see the user name that submitted a post when looking at the feed. Doesn’t seem to be any settings to correct that.

I seem to be at a stalemate where I like features for various apps, but just still haven’t found my all in one favorite.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I've been enjoying Boost lately

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (5 children)

For browsing on the desktop, I strongly recommend https://phtn.app!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Memmy is worth a look. Memmy has that option and it’s got a UI that was also heavily influenced by Apollo.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

You should make an issue on Voyager's Github! I don't think anyone's requested that feature yet.

Edit: Added to github

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

Re-welcome. Hope you enjoy lemmy like am I.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Welcome back!

[–] [email protected] 37 points 10 months ago (4 children)

What is it with me and using the least popular thing. I'm sitting here on a Mac, writing Ruby, and posting on Kbin. All my favorite shows get cancelled. None of my favorite musicians are terribly well known. Every new car looks horrible to me.

I think if you want something to be successful, make it as unappealing to me as possible.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You might be what is called a "harbinger of failure". A type of consumer that continuously and unwittingly buys failing products. https://scienceblog.com/479872/harbinger-of-failure-some-consumers-unerringly-buy-unpopular-products/

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

This sounds more like me than "hipster." It's not that I like things that then get popular, only to not like them. I like things that haven't been and will never be popular, just because I like them. I'd love if people started enjoying the things I like because it would help them survive.

Anybody have something they hate they want me to buy so it can be destroyed?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

As long as I don't have to use it, sure.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Did you have a zune? Please tell me you had a zune :D

I myself gave a bit of a harbinger streak to me. Proud owner of a Nokia N-gage, I loved google Stadia and all my favorite snackflavors seem to disappear.

I'm almost scared to like new concepts or products and techniques, afraid of killing them off.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You're clearly a hipster. Don't ask for sympathy from us, you've made your choices

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

The real fediverse hipsters use lotide: https://narwhal.city/

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

unappealing to me as possible

explains the lemmy interface for me

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

The real fediverse hipsters use lotide: https://narwhal.city/

[–] [email protected] 32 points 10 months ago

I skimmed through it, it's actually a decent article.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

@[email protected] has been pretty bullish on the fediverse for quite a while now. It's come up a few times on the vergecast over the last year or so. I'm not surprised he wrote this decent explainer!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The fediverse is as if you took X, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook and made them all interoperable so you could post anything from anywhere, and all your followers would be guaranteed to see it.

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

You probably have seen posts in Lemmy communities from a mastadon user without realizing it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


It’s an interconnected social platform ecosystem based on an open protocol called ActivityPub, which allows you to port your content, data, and follower graph between networks.

You know how everyone online is like, “Give me your email, it’s the only stable thing on the web, and so it’s the most important tool for building a lasting audience” now?

And the places where you connect with your friends, or make a living as a creator, couldn’t be irrevocably destroyed by a billionaire with a sink and a bunch of weird ideas about financial products?

The ActivityPub protocol I mentioned a minute ago is a little like email: it has specifications for senders and receivers and supports lots of different kinds of content.

You can always have different accounts for different things, but I think many people will end up having one main identity — your Threads username, or your Mastodon handle, or even a domain you hook up to all of these services individually — that ports across all of these systems.

A lot of folks I’ve talked to say that, basically, if we’d built social media like this 20 years ago, the world would be better and smarter and we’d all be richer and better-looking.


The original article contains 2,713 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 92%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

The Verge has been all in on the Fediverse, and they're probably the biggest advocate in the media. They're also going through the process of switching their entire backend for direct fediverse support. If you have a mastodon or kbin consider boosting this at their official account (@[email protected]) here: https://mastodon.social/@verge/111891107107406018

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I still haven't figured out how to get content posted on Mastadon in my Lemmy feed. I'm using Thunder for Android as my client

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You can't, unless the Mastodon user tags a community you're subscribe to.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

So, you won't see Mastodon content on Lemmy unless a Mastodon user has posted in a group (the generic term for community, subreddits, etc). For example, here's an exchange I had with some Mastodon users. Groups don't always come from Lemmy and as a Lemmy user you can subscribe to more Mastodon centric groups like [email protected] or even PeerTube channels like [email protected]. Direct user-to-user microblog style interaction with Mastodon users is not supported, and that's mostly a design choice of the devs. Projects like kbin/mbin seek to bridge the gap and directly support both experiences.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It bothers me how rose-tinted this article is. It pours praise onto the fediverse while glossing over all the major problems. They also keep saying "everything is available everywhere", which it isn't, or "you can take your account anywhere" which isn't a thing on most fediverse sites, and where it is it's limited.

I dunno, it's good to be positive, but I feel this article over-promises and fails to explain what is is trying to. If anything, it muddies some of the basics and sets people up to leave as soon as they realise the experience isn't all that or that instances don't work how they think.

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