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 🙃

  • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • Candelestine@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • Kotking@kbin.social
        2·
        8 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.

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
      3·
      8 months ago

      I think this lack of strictness is exactly what makes ActivityPub so good. Imagine if ActivityPub was designed around Mastodon, Lemmy and Mastodon would never be able to interact!

      The limitations aren’t protocol issues per se; boosting every comment and upvote is a workaround Lemmy uses, but like Lemmy, Mastodon has no obligation to show all of that, and the official Mastodon frontend has methods built in to cut down on the spam. It’d probably be good if they’d enable these methods by default when Mastodon detects Lemmy posts, but when you start adding workarounds for specific platforms, the work never ends…

      A lot of features that Mastodon lacks are implemented in a Mastodon fork (the glitch one), including showing Lemmy posts properly. People know Mastodon because it’s the “original” but there are a bunch of forks made by people who disagreed with the Mastodon team, and all of them are equally valid. Those alternatives just aren’t as big, unfortunately.

      kbin/mbin seem to be the best option for “Lemmy user who wants to interact with microblogging platforms”. IceShrimp or the Mastodon Glitch fork seem to be best for “microbloggers who want to see Lemmy content”. Then there’s Friendica and a bunch of others that are aimed at entirely different communities still.

      It’s kind of unfortunate that the platforms that grew big inside the Fediverse are the ones with such strict ideas about the direction their projects take, but then again, perhaps that’s why they succeeded where others failed.