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:
- Communities repost comments too, making the community feed unreadable
- 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)
- 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 🙃
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 N2 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.
It seriously doesn’t do Markdown formatting?! That’s a no for me, Dawg
That’s like 2/1 the fun for me
I think it’s the only platform that doesn’t do any kind of formatting.
Mastodon renders most Markdown content just fine, and federation is usually done through HTML already. Their flavour of Markdown is limited, but what would you expect from a platform designed with character limits in mind?
Users and groups are interpretations of the standard, but there’s nothing specifying how you should treat either in the specs. All you have is the semantic meaning, which you may or may not care about.
The protocol is ensuring federation just fine, the problems occur at the user interface level. Mastodon users and Lemmy users can interact with the same threads (though Lemmy decided not to provide ActivityPub lists for individual users so you can’t follow people, and doesn’t have a “timeline” to post unrelated stuff to).
When I first opened the internet, I was told to download Firefox for the best experience. I also needed Java and Flash or my games and websites wouldn’t work. Some websites only worked in IE because of ActiveX. These days the internet has been standardised to some extent, but just four or five years ago a lot of developers put a lot of effort into supporting Internet Explorer and its quirks. This is a bit like Lemmy users only using the subset of Markdown that Mastodon supports, and manually quoting people with links to ensure tagged users get informed correctly.
And God, dear Lord, holy fuck, don’t get me started on email. You think email supports HTML, and officially it does, but no two email clients/webmail clients render teo HTML documents the same way.
Speaking of email, that’s actually a great example. Email is used for all manner of information exchange, but you’ll have a hard time reading the email output of industrial software on Gmail, they’re basically using attachments to send binary data. Don’t even think about manually composing such messages because some critical piece of software will explode in your face. Just because you’re using the same protocol, doesn’t mean you can use every app for every purpose.
Even on the Fediverse, I think Lemmy and Mastodon are two of the more limited services out there. Lemmy doesn’t implement a timeline, which most of the Fediverse seems to be built around, while Mastodon only supports the features it was designed for. When you look at alternative server solutions, compatibility starts broadening real quick. If you want to interact with both, choose neither; mbin and whatever MissKey fork is popular these days will probably suit you much better.
Some counterpoints …
Otherwise, yes mastodon does render markdown now. It’s relatively new and it’s to forget about it as you can’t write with the same markdown (which is a rather telling choice I think about mastodon’s minimalist ethos). But as you say, it’s rather limited (I’ve never tested its limtations myself) … and that’s just a markdown spec. Anything remotely fancy like MFM coming from a *key platform/fork just doesn’t work.
And yea, I’m with you on lemmy/masto being limited. Thing is, I’d bet that this isn’t a coincidence. I feel like you could argue that ActivityPub is on the vague and ambitious side of things and leaves a lot to the platform/software devs. And so to make something work with that the first generation of platforms had to be rather focused in order to make a working and usable platform. A bit of a “worse is better” scenario. kbin/mbin definitely show promise in broadening the horizons of what the fediverse, as a UI/UX can be. I’m not sure why you advocate joining a misskey fork as they don’t have any federated groups interface (they’re basically very fancy microblogging platforms).
Where I think this should head is more modularity, where the AcitivityPub server you use is far more generic, and basically handles for you anything the protocol can handle, while your interface into the “data stream” is much more flexible/modular, being provided by composable apps that allow you to view and write posts/content in any format if you want. For example, in this kind of system, lemmy wouldn’t be a monolithic platform. Instead it’d be an app for writing and viewing ActivityPub content in the “lemmy” format, that you can load into your generic browser interface/environment, and use whenever you’re viewing content others have written using the same app.
From the little I understand, Bonfire (now in beta) has similar-ish ideas.