Lemmy can only follow communities, not users. Otherwise it would require a whole new UI and other major changes. Doesnt make much sense when you can create a second account on Mastodon or one of many other platforms which already implement user following much better.
Fair enough. It'd be nice to centralize all my social media in one place - Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc. It's actually super-cool that this works the other way at all - I've followed a couple communities on Mastodon and it's neat seeing posts pop up in my feeds.
But I totally get why Lemmy works the way it does. I almost wonder if maybe it makes more sense to be able to follow Mastodon hashtags? I'm not familiar enough with the ActivityPub protocol to know how easy that is, though (and I get the feeling it's not easy...).
You cant follow hashtags, only follow the users who post them and then filter according to the hashtag on each post. That doesnt make sense for Lemmy (it only follows group actors, which are similar to user accounts).
Modelling tags as communities actually sounds like a good idea though. But you wouldn't want to namespace them by instance, hmm. I guess they could just have their own namespace as a pseudo-instance.
@nutomic Is there willingness to consider adding support for following users (and perhaps hashtags too)? It would be a good interop feature. IMO one of the biggest selling points of the Fediverse is that I can follow users from PixelFed, Calckey, Lemmy, etc and have their content show up seamlessly in my feed; I can even interact with it. Not having this feature just seems like it cuts off Lemmy users from the majority of the Fediverse, unless they want to manage multiple accounts on multiple platforms.
Check out kbin.pub, it's like lemmy but supports microblogs (mastodon-like). It's not yet fully federated with Lemmy but will try to. I'm not a user though, just found about it today.
@Cougar I'm already familiar with kbin and I know they have that feature, but I think the platform is still in beta, so IDK if it's ready for serious usage or not.
Good point!
@nutomic @EnglishMobster wouldn't it be possible to follow a mastodon user and view them as some kind of single-person community? This would allow Lemmy-users to view those on their feed
No, following users is not supported by Lemmy. You could try kbin though which supports that.
Lemmy only supports following communities, not users unfortunately.
Support / questions about Lemmy.