this post was submitted on 07 Jan 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).

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As of right now, you can follow either Lemmy accounts directly or follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon relatively easily if you know what you are searching for. This is really cool because you can read (and participate to !) discussions without having tu use a Lemmy-specific app or account. The wonders of the fediverse !

But the interaction through mastodon has a few issues, notably:

  1. Communities repost comments too, making the community feed unreadable
  2. Media in Lemmy posts are links, which make them quite cumbersome to watch (which is also the case in Lemmy itself ? I'm curious as to why) (minor problem)
  3. To my knowledge, you can't post to a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but that's to be expected I guess. (minor problem)

The discussions on Lemmy often are more interesting than over on mastodon but I prefer mastodon's format so I am way more active over there. It would be way more pleasant to have everything in the same feed but because of 1. this isn't possible at the moment.

So the question is: does anybody know if Lemmy can or will fix any of these issues, especially n°1 ? Or is this something to be fixed on Mastodon's side ?

sry for English 🙃

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 10 months ago (2 children)

OP, I'm pretty much the opposite. I like the way Lemmy feels and operates vs. Mastadon (I'm on both though) and so generally spend more time here. I'd like the ability to see what's going on over there, from over here.

I've always been a forums guy.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Am I weird for thinking comparing Lemmy and Mastodon is odd? To me it's almost like saying "I prefer apples over gravity" - they're two completely different things in my opinion.

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

Yeah, I think they have very different use cases. For Lemmy, I've mostly figured out what that is and it feels familiar to me. For Mastadon, I'm still trying to figure it out.

I was never on any of the microblog platforms.

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

Microblogging is pretty much just box into which you can shout whatever you want, and sometimes people interact with what you said.

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

Makes me think of doing a monologue or something. Lol

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

I’ve always been a forums guy.

Hear hear! I’d put “blogosphere” there too. And in a way, most of the world is too, right? In that Twitter was never bigger than the other big platforms, but had instead gotten in with politicians and journalists and so had some more cache around it.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Regarding 3: you can. On Mastodon, simply meantion the lemmy Community in your Post and it will be posted to that community

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I already have seen some of those and sure it works...sometimes.

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

If it doesnt work it's a federation issue

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Also I would like to be able to follow a Mastodon user from Lemmy

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The lead devs have acknowledged that it would be good (they did an AMA not long ago). But they feel it’d be a lot of work and so not a priority right now.

Personally, I think lemmy would have a lot to provide in reimagining a user’s personal blogging feed as something more like a personal community they manage for themselves.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

...I really like the sound of that idea.

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

Me too! A lemmy user could even have multiple personal blogs if they wanted, each separately follow-able, with cross posting when wanted. Then you could follow either their posts to general communities, and/or any of their personal blogs.

Once multi communities come, lemmy then becomes an interesting blogging platform that should also interop with mastodon well.

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

This is out of scope for Lemmy, there are already dozens of Fediverse projects which provide this functionality so it makes no sense to reimplement it in Lemmy as well. And if you want both follow both communities and users in the same platform, thats exactly what Kbin and Mbin provide.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Out of scope, yes. But it sure would be nice from a more abstract perspective. Right now content flows in one direction. Lemmy->Mastadon, but not vice versa.

This could be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on whether you are a content creator or content consumer. If you're creating content, a post to Lemmy will have a wider reach (huzzah!). But if you're a lazy lurker and want to check fewer streams, then you sign up to Mastadon and get both (huzzah!).

Anecdote from history, for comparison.

Back in the late 80s, early 90s, when OS/2 and Windows were competing for marketshare, this was a choice that IBM made -- to make a Windows compatibility layer on OS/2. Technically, it was a masterpiece, and increased the number of programs available to OS/2 users. Why choose Windows when you can choose OS/2 and you can select from the best apps from both ecosystems! Except it backfired within a few years -- developers stopped developing for OS/2 entirely, instead targeting the Windows API because they could reach both platforms with it.

I suspect that Mastadon being able to draw content from Lemmy, and not vice versa, is a similar thing here. But I'm unsure if it will help or harm Lemmy.

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

Join us on kbin. This is precisely the feature kbin provides.

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

But no apps on kbin :(

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

But U dont have rss feeds I guess

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

As far as I can tell, it’s not lemmy’s problem, it’s mastodon’s.

Lemmy can’t control how mastodon presents the information that lemmy shares.

And mastodon does a bad job of formatting lemmy content because mastodon is actually a fairly minimalist (I’d say brutalist) platform. No text formatting. No threads (well now they have minimal threading). Only one feed type (equivalent to “new” on lemmy). And communities and groups aren’t processed as groups, but just like users that boost/re-tweet everything in them, which is not what groups actually are at all.

This is the fundamental problem with the promise of the fediverse … platform inter operation is not guaranteed at all as there’s no clear path to reaching common ground on how to format every other platform’s content. The protocol has nothing (or very little) to say about that. Then, once you have a bunch of platforms, you’ve got a lot of work to do, as each platform needs to workout how to render every other platform’s formatting. For N platforms, that’s basically N^2^ formatting projects.

In reality, federation is mostly an inter-platform system. For the moment at least. It makes sense that at some point one’s “window” onto the fediverse is capable of understanding any format you want and will render everything as it was intended. Instead, at the moment, the fediverse is running like it’s still 2010 and the cloud is still new and cool and having users on servers is the only way to do things so that we’re all still stuck on servers/instances and bound to their admins and applications. IMO, it’s hardly living up to the promise of the internet, and hardly doing to social media what the internet did to computing.

With the internet, I opened my browser and visited any webpage I wanted to see it as it was intended by its author no matter who wrote it.

With the fediverse, I visit one webpage and see any post I want, so long as it doesn’t come from a defederated server (which can be a problem sometimes), but only in the one format that my one webpage/instance has decided on, no matter how it’s supposed to look and indeed does look if I were to view it on another webpage/instance. When the browser is over 30 years old and PCs around 50 … this feels unimaginative to me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

It seriously doesn't do Markdown formatting?! That's a no for me, Dawg

That's like 2/1 the fun for me

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

I think it’s the only platform that doesn’t do any kind of formatting.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (4 children)

You could use kbin which can serve and display both varieties just fine.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I wanted to point out kbin.social has been having some stability issues, so I've been using the mbin fork at kbin.run and it's been working amazingly.

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

They've been mostly resolved in my experience. Kbin.social has been working great.

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

Yup, kbin for the win.

Just wish it had a mobile app...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Makes me so sad

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

@interstellar is being developed for Android, and Lunar is working on Kbin support for iOS. Still a good ways to go tmk, but we're getting there!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

This is exactly why I op'd for Kbin over just Lemmy.

Lemmy + Mastodon support.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

This is the way.

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

Images in Lemmy posts should be rendered correctly by Mastodon with this pr which federates the link content-type.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I'm a little new to it all, but this bothered me as well. As far as I can tell, the underlying issue is that ActivityPub isn't strict enough about how these things should be implemented, so everyone implements them in similar but slightly incompatible ways.

I think either Lemmy or Mastodon "could" fix it on their ends if they wanted to, but it's not super easy and so far they're deciding not to. I'm actually right in the middle of messing around with kbin right now, which aims to support the best of both worlds (can talk to Lemmy and interoperate well with Lemmy communities but can also follow / message / hear from Mastodon users within a UI that makes sense for Mastodon). It doesn't seem like it's as mature yet as either Mastodon or Lemmy though, but I'm pretty likely to switch to it for exactly this reason, that I'd like to have one account that can talk to both.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm also likely to switch to kbin at some point. Personally I take a fairly long-term view of this project, so I'm waiting to see which projects keep going, which fail, and which new ones haven't even popped up yet. I'm aware that devs can pivot and change their minds about things.

I picked lemmy initially more or less at random, and I do like it here, but I'm ultimately going to move to the most functional product. That broader idea of the Fediverse is why I'm here.

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

Agree I really was intrigued after being comfortable with reddit, but bailing because all my Reddit interactions was from phone, so cut story short tried Mastodon.social>Kbin.social>Misskey.io
Also funkwhale and hubzilla out of curiosity.
So I really interested in tech but there is a lot of wait between some of them agree on some points.

My aim for now to make Kbin community for a game that can directly refer to works of artists directly and for users of Microblogs to see topics and join in on discussions.

From personal experience Mastodon seems fine with threadiverse while Misskey can see posts if forced (and only kbin threads, link ones won't work at least) but commenting gives error. Also Misskey quotes shows as comments for a post/message etc, but not federate to kbin so as loop around don't work as well.

So having followed many artists on Misskey and having some people following me there kinda wish I could interact with magazine(community) directly, but too early for that I guess.

Also Misskey making webp conversion for images is good for storage(you get personal 2 gb and more with time or donations) but Kbin not federate them properly... So that also an headache...

Waiting when Kbin release api so I can remind about this problem again.

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

Mastodons side. They are aware and just don't care.

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

A groups rework is currently on mastodon's roadmap as inprogress. We've not heard a lot of what this will look like but it's very likely it will solve issue 1.

2 is related to how Mastodon handles the ¿page? object in the activitypub spec. I believe Mastodon prefers notes but could implement dedicated handling of it and probably will at some point.

3 is actually just incorrect. All you need to do is mention the community and it will post.

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

The groups implementation for Mastodon has been stuck as a draft for 1.5 years now, I wouldnt expect it to get merged anytime soon. Even worse, for reasons I dont understand they made the group federation intentionally incompatible with Lemmy.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19059

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Mastodon and Lemmy are simply not intended to be used cross-platform. Each has their own use-case.

Mastodon does plan to add "communities", which presumably can or will federate with Lemmy.