So I’ve been trying to get myself accustomed to this place and understand whats going on.
To my understanding: -There are Lemmy instances -Instances communicate with each other to create the “Lemmyverse” -There a larger version of this that encapsulates all (or a lot of) services that use ActivityPub called the “Fediverse”
My question is how or if would I interact with said other services from Lemmy? Is that possible? Could I say, see Mastodon or Peertube content from Lemmy? If I can, how? Do I sign up to those sevices with my existing Lemmy account? Can or will I soon be able to interact with everything through one account? Because that seems to me like it should be possible assuming everything and everyone is federated.
How is Lemmy interconnected with the Fediverse right now, and how might it become further connected in the future?
At the moment Lemmy and Kbin federate exactly, Lemmy communities and Kbin magazines federate 1:1 with upvotes, downvotes, comments, all working as expected.
Mastodon users can follow communities and magazines as though they were users, post to them, and see replies. Although they see everything linearly. If you ever see a community post that starts by tagging the community that likely came from mastodon.
Lemmy does not currently, and may never, allow you to follow mastodon users or tags. Kbin offers a microblog view that does display mastodon content in its intended form.
I hope Lemmy at least adds the ability to follow other lemmings so their posts appear in the feed.
Though, then I don’t see why it wouldn’t work with mastodon users too, since they just seem to be treated as regular lemmings in their profile and all, aside from the tagging.
I know following users was a pretty big sticking point on reddit, it was certainly a feature I had no interest in using, but it’s a lot more interesting here with federated interoperability. Regardless, I think it’ll be a while before the lemmy devs even have time to think about features like that.
Magazines? I apparently missed something so far.
Kbin calls them magazines. Same thing.
Mastodon users can follow communities and magazines as though they were users, post to them, and see replies. Although they see everything linearly.
I know this is a thing, I’ve seen people doing exactly this, but I still have zero clue how to do it or how it works.
I’m new to it as well and I’ve been poking around for info recently, so take this with a grain of salt.
Fediverse = Lemmies + Mastodons + Pixfed + all the other things that use Activity pub. They can, more or less, all talk to each other. So you can, more or less, get stuff from Lemmy on Mastodon and vice versa. But for right now, it looks like that can be a bit of a hassle – or at least more of a hassle than we’re used to with centralized services like FB, IG, Twitter, etc. You generally have to look them up and get a specific link and search on your own instance and follow.
But the fact that they can do this at all, and that so many people are working on making it better, means it will probably become easier and easier over time. And the more you play around with them, the less of a hassle it becomes.
My takeaway, for the moment, is that it’s simpler to keep Mastodon and Lemmy as two separate things, but it’s not so hard to cross instances within each of them. And since I am still new to this, I’ve joined a few instances of each to get a feel for them. Signups for both are really simple. The main thing I look at to decide if I’d want to join is their local feeds – the things you could browse easily if you joined that instance. I feel like it gives you a sense of who’s there and what they’re posting and what the instance’s main interests are.
I’ve been using lemmy.world as a general instance and joined beehaw.org and mander.xyz for more focused instances with different approaches to moderation and federation. But following communities across instances is pretty easy to do once you try it out. So that means you could have just one single instance and still follow interesting people or communities across all the other instances out there.
I agree it’s better to use Lemmy and Mastodon separately. A tip: You can follow your Lemmy account from Mastodon and easily boost your own posts onto there, which might be a nice way to increase exposure of anything you post.
As an aside; Kbin allows you to boost posts. If you follow a Kbin user from Mastodon you’ll see all their boosts (and regular posts, and replies). So, if you follow your own Kbin account from your Mastodon account you’ll easily be able to transfer any posts you see to Mastodon - and then boost them to your Mastodon followers.
Nice! That’s good to know. I also just checked out a post from @[email protected] with some great info about viewing and following posts from entire instances here. That’s pretty mind-blowing.
Thanks for the mention @brainfreeze! I just wanted to add that having explored lemmy and mastodon, I really prefer kbin as a user. I’ve got access to both read and post in a searchable manner, and it nicely separates the twitter style content from Mastodon into the Microblog section. There’s also already a number of 3rd party greasemonkey scripts that enable things like collapsible comments and a floating subscription bar, link courtesy of @Boabab.
You really need to just test on a piecemeal basis. It’s a matter of what works with what, and sometimes even the devs don’t know.
What I’ve found so far:
Lemmy uniquely grabs old posts from Lemmy, but most software is “here and now” so you won’t see a history if you go somewhere until your instance is following it.
Mastodon can see Lemmy communities and users and you can DM people on mastodon from lemmy, but you can’t follow Mastodon users on Lemmy because the paradigm is different.
Lotide communities can be followed and interacted with. I think the latest Lemmy has fixed federation in the other direction.
Friendica groups can be followed and interacted with. Users are the same as mastodon users
Peertube channels can be followed like communities and you can see, upvote, and comment on videos, but you can’t post anything new – your instance will let you, but it won’t federate.
Kbin communities can be followed, be aware that kbin is in its early days so it has a lot of work on the back-end.
I was not able to federate with a.gru.ppe communities.
Hopefully this helps, and maybe others can post their discoveries. Decentralization is strength on the fediverse. The more things we can connect to, the less reliant we are on any one thing.
To do a lot of these, you put the community, magazine, or channel url into Lemmy search. It takes longer than you expect but if it’s federating at all it’ll show up on the search, then you can go and subscribe.
Lemmy doesn’t currently work with Mastodon, and I don’t think there are any plans to change that. So the two platforms, while both federated, aren’t truly compatible.
Kbin (kbin.social) is a sort of in-between service. You can follow both Lemmy communities and mastodon accounts. It has two different halves, with a feed for Lemmy and a Microblog feed for Mastodon posts.
This confuses me as to what the long term appeal of a lemmy or mastodon account is. Would general users be better off joining kBin, while users who want to only interact with mastodon, or only interact with lemmy, and not with each other, would join either lemmy or mastodon?
It sounds like KBin has the best support for acting as an alternative frontend for lemmy and mastodon. If someone on lemmy links to a mastodon post, or vice versa, you have to leave the instance to go view and interact with the post, but on kBin that could not neccesarily be the case.
It just seems like having some sort of universal frontend would be the most flexible and not have any downsides.
The downside is ease of use. Not everyone wants to set up a mastodon feed or a Lemmy feed. Lots of users only want one specific type of post.
For instance, I hate the Twitter-style microblog. I choose to use Lemmy because I specifically want to exclude Mastodon posts from my feed.
There’s also the issue with app development. Apps for Lemmy have undergone a lot of development in the past few weeks. Apps for kbin are basically non-existent. This is an issue that could be solved with time and the right developer(s) but as it currently stands a mobile user will be better off using kbin in their browser. So if someone is looking for a more seamless transition from Reddit, the natural move is to Lemmy.
That makes sense! I guess for me, personally, if I want to be able to access and interact with multiple types of media I should create an account with a platform that supports multiple other platforms like kbin does.
I wonder if there will be a platform that is dedicated to supporting as many of the other large fediverse platforms as possible.
Thanks for the explanation!
Honestly, just realized you could do it. It’s so weird looking but so incredible nonetheless. This has so much potiential to be so much bigger.
