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 🙃
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.