Can someone explain to me what is the link between Mastodon and Lemmy? From the Wikipedia chart, it looks like ActivityPub links them together in some fashion; I just don't get how.
In theory, Lemmy and Mastodon are compatible with one another, as they both use ActivityPub.
In practice:
Mastodon users can only see Lemmy posts as Boosts ("retweets"), and from what I hear, it's fairly annoying and not a good experience
Lemmy users can't see anything on Mastodon at all, Lemmy doesn't have a way to federate with Mastodon instances yet.
This is the first time Lemmy has seen this many users ever, so I'm confident both of these issues will be fixed sooner or later. When they are, you'll be able to see Lemmy posts on Mastodon as if they were posts ("tweets"), and you'll be able to see Mastodon posts on Lemmy as some kind of post (not sure if the format has been decided yet).
Just to clarify, Mastodon users can already make posts to Lemmy communities, just not the other way around yet.
Definitely agree it's not a good experience yet though.
It'll be great when fediverse will become interconnected open ecosystem
I'm really interested in the idea of these different kinds of websites being interoperable because of ActivityPub. Like the different websites are basically different frontends for people who prefer link aggregators or micro-blogs or other kinds of websites. It's a really cool idea!
Okay, so it's not really implemented yet. Can't wait until federation is more profoundly implemented then!
Thanks
@pankkake @ubergeek77 I'll actually use this as a an opportunity to test something - I copied your comment's link into mastodon and am replying to it with my mastodon account. I can see the thread in mastodon, and in theory, this reply should show up properly in Lemmy too.
It looks no different than any of the other comments to me. Though I haven't been here for even a day, so... :))
Yeah so it seems to work! Pretty cool that I can do that.
I would like to add to your picture yggdrasil and matrix based messengers, as this will help infrastructure to be more robust and expand
@ubergeek77 @pankkake you can comment and make lemmy posts from Mastodon and others. I'm on Friendica for example and made this comment from my Friendica profile.
How did you find this post ?
It's all a little arbitrary. When you create a new service (like Lemmy, or Mastodon), you can have them link with anything, in any fashion you like. The defaults are mostly sensible.
For example, I've just made a mastodon post asking /r/casual a question. Once that synchronizes across, you'll see the topic over there.
The only problem with federation is duplicate communities, and I don’t even see that as being necessarily a bad thing. I’ll subscribe to multiple communities for the same thing and if, over time, I end up getting annoyed with some of them I’ll just unsubscribe.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, but especially with the amount of news users (and subs) migrating from Reddit there is a certain potential for chaos for sure.
However, for me the pros of this approach still outweigh the cons as, like you said, it also provides more choice with which community you want to interact.
Like chess, but are a bit tired of googling en passant? Just find a community, that is more focused on the game on a different instance.
On one hand, yeah, federation is cool. On the other, I've already seen two @Technology communities on two different instances, and I can see this issue becoming even worse.
A good solution would be to have some mechanism of merging same-named communities of multiple instances. But, alas, nothing like that afaik
Although this issue might be more severe for Lemmy, I think it still occurs on Reddit, but it ends up working itself out. For instance, there's also a "r/tech" and (at some point) there was a "r/technologynews" subreddit, which you could view as redundant and possibly confusing to new users. But r/tech seems to have focused on longer-form more in-depth discussion while r/technology is certainly the larger and more general of the two, so most users will probably just sub to the larger one and maybe others will decide they like the vibe of r/tech more. In the long term, I'm sure a similar thing will happen to communities with the same, or close to the same, name.
Yes, but the problem is that your analogy isn't a 1-2-1 comparison. You are correct that at reddit we had r/tech, r/technology, r/technews, etc etc etc, but on lemmy, ALL OF THOSE can be named "Technology" with exactly the same spelling. So, when I'm trying to refer someone to a "specific" Technology, I also have to include the server. A conversation may go, "Hey WooChoo, you gotta check out the posts over on Lemmy. They have the best Technology content on the internet" Then you go to some rando "Technology" on a new lemmy server and you don't see any posts. What are the chances that you come back to me and say, "Hey Debo, remember that referral you gave me 6 weeks ago when we were talking? I went there and there wasn't any users." "Oh, sorry WooChoo, I forgot that you have to go to "THIS SPECIFIC SERVER of Technology" and then you're in a federation conversation when you were just trying to share a hot tip.
I think you're totally right! That's partially why I said it's a bigger problem on Lemmy. Tools like browse.feddit.de will be pretty important; it'd be great if they were placed prominently somewhere.
I didn’t even know browse.feddit.de existed until you posted it!!! Hot tip right there. :)
But on Lemmy you can also give your comm a name (and change it later), so you can have /c/technology on multiple instances and each may have a different name indicating its purpose.
I think you guys are entirely missing the point of a decentralized community and want to make it centralized. You come to lemmy with the expectation that it is something else, and when finding that it has some differences, you want to change it to fit your view. Come with an open mind and see the strong points. Because what you get is much more than what you miss.
Having two (or even more) communities/subs for the same topic is a feature. I understand that you think that having the community split in 2 might not be ideal, but that is the price to be paid for decentralization. And decentralization is the way to go. If one actor stars misbehaving, we easily have alternatives. One community starts being too draconian? Go to the other one. Start a new one. One community goes down due to too much bandwidth? You have the other one. Decentralization is so so good. I suggest watching some videos on the topic. You will grow to love it.
Now, the 2 technology communities: Pick both if you want. Interact with them, in different ways. Don't spam of course. But it will sort itself out. One of the communities will prevail as the bigger one and the other as the smaller. See it as a sort of evolution of communities.
Merging the communities would be wrong. That would defeat the purpose of decentralization! What could be done, is some sort of "tagging" for easier subscribing. If both of these communities were tagged as "technology", than you could subscribe to the tag "technology" and it would subscribe to both subs. Just some UX thing. But they need to remain 2 separate subs!
Fully merging them, sure, bad Idea.
Having way to browse both at the same time, though? Basically, some sort of a multi-community system that lets me see posts from both communities easily, and post to both (or selected few) at the same time.
Posts could even be "merged" by the hash of the content, so that there are no visible duplicates.
It would be a nice feature to be able to group communities into feeds.
That'd be a pretty cool feature. Sounds like it could be a front end "fix" too
It'd be cool if there was some mechanism where Community A could follow Community B, so that all posts from Community B automatically show up in A. This way, you could also aggregate communities with different names, create multiple custom front pages etc.
I think that's fine. Each instance will likely have its own culture, so you can choose which instance's community is best for you. I might prefer gaming on lemmy.world, technology on beehaw, etc
People have been begging for this. Lemmy is open source, I'm sure someone will make a PR for it eventually. There is even a bounty for it on BountySource.
All those users who were told "Please move from lemmy.ml to somewhere else. It'll crash. Please spread out" are now seeing why :))
I saw a reddit post about alternatives and lemmy was what stuck out the most, and then there was another about how it works (not that indepth) and from there I got to lemmy.world and been here since yesterday
Federation was very hard for me to comprehend at the beginning, but it all clicked once I read a little of the documentation.
Likewise, it was feeling a little dry here today and I finally figured out the same thing you did. Being able to subscribe across many servers is wicked sick, and having an instance sitting "in front" of them the way we're using it makes it slick as heck when those other instances are unavailable or spotty.
It would be great if the instance kept a pulse on how federation to other instances is going and showed a health check in the app sidebar and near instance names to temper user expectations.
It would be great if the instance kept a pulse on how federation to other instances is going and showed a health check in the app sidebar and near instance names to temper user expectations.
That sounds like a great idea!
I'm honestly surprised at how useable Lemmy is as a whole. Mastodon shit itself during the Twitter migration. Idk if it's just a lower volume of users or what.
Mastodon is written in RoR, whereas Lemmy's backend is in Rust. It's an order of magnitude faster just by being a compiled language with lighter-weight middleware.
I haven't used Ruby/RoR in half a decade but even in the early 2010's it was memingly slow compared to many alternatives.
Blazingly fast
;)
Create a username on some other instance then search for the intsnace on lemmy.ml and just subscribe and post and comment. So much easiter. When i started yesterday i started with lemmy.ml but was like why is it so slow. realized that it just goes up and down so i created a username and lemmy.world and haven't looked back
I did the same. Started on .ml then moved to .world to spread the load. Also heard some things about the mods on .ml
Right? This is so neat. I like having my own instance to live in and interact with all the others.
Plus I can look at all the components and how this thing actually works. Plus it is open source so if I wanted to I could fork it and customize my instance even more.
Selfhosting squad! o/
Damn skippy!
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