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 🙃
Communities repost comments because otherwise comments wouldn’t reach other servers. This is a huge problem with Mastodon, where only the user’s home server has all upvotes and responses. Join a smaller server and you don’t see any of them. This is very annoying for well-known social media people, because every now and then they make a mistake and hundreds of people will think they’re the first to correct them on it, because they don’t see the replies that the hundreds of other servers have sent. Some servers run tools like Fedifetcher to work around this problem, but that increases the already significant load of running Mastodon and rarely completely fixes the problem.
This is because Mastodon does not implement the content type Lemmy uses to submit posts. Various Mastodon forks do support it, though. Mastodon defaults to “show subject and a link to the original post” for content types it doesn’t understand (“location”, “event”) and auto embedding takes care of showing the picture, so it looks like there’s partial support but this is really “hands up in the air, say ‘fuck it’, just do anything” behaviour. In practice, supporting Lemmy’s content type (which is a standard type, by the way) wouldn’t even take that much work, the Mastodon devs just don’t seem interested in showing anything but mictoblogging content which the UI was designed for.
You can, if you tag the community. There are some protocol level differences between Lemmy and Mastodon, both based on well thought out considerations based on reading the ActivityPub+ActivityStreams protocols, but as long as you can get the community in the right ActivityPub reference fields, your post will show up.
In various Mastodon apps, you can hide retoots and boosts per account to cut down on the Lemmy spam. Other apps (Fedilab for instance) allow for threaded views, mirroring the Lemmy experience more closely.
Your first point is a protocol level problem that neither Mastodon nor Lemmy can “just” solve. It’s possible for Mastodon apps/frontends to hide this problem, though. Mastodon should also implement something similar in my opinion, because currently the lack of response propagation is causing real issues.
Your second point needs to be implemented by Mastodon. Lemmy does nothing wrong here.
Your third problem doesn’t seem to be a problem at all, at least as far as I know. It’s possible some apps don’t set the right fields causing interoperability problems, but as far as I know you can just submit posts from Mastodon.