Fediverse

Hi, and welcome!

Lemmy does not, as of now, interoperate very well with Fediverse services such as Mastodon and Pixelfed. Sure, you can follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon, but it's not a pleasant experience. The group just boosts everything that is ever posted to it.

Likewise, Lemmy does not work with Phanphy - it has its own API, and separate apps. It's too different from Pixelfed/Mastodon for it to make sense to share an API.

If you search for @elena@lemmy.world at mastodon.social you will, however, be able to see your user from there; you can view this post, and if you have an account you can comment on it and contribute to the discussion like anyone else. You can also boost the post or comments to it, making it possible for content from Lemmy to reach far and wide. We sometimes do get comments from Mastodon users, so it clear that this happens every now and then, but mostly it's kept separate.

Mastodon users can also post to Lemmy by tagging a community (like they would tag an a.gup.pe group), but it's not very intuitive.

We commonly refer to Lemmy as part of the Threadiverse - a subset of the Fediverse which revolves around threaded discussions around shared content (Reddit like). The main platforms are Lemmy, Mbin (which is what I'm currently posting from), and PieFed.

Mbin and PieFed go further in the direction of interoperability than Lemmy does. Mbin supports Mastodon-like microblogging; if you check out the search for the hashtag Lemmy, you'll see not only this post, but also microblogs from Mastodon and all kinds of content. Limited, of course, by what is federated with that instance (Kbin.earth doesn't have too many users).

In Piefed, users can follow Mastodon groups made with a.gup.pe, such as the knitting group. Often Mastodon users start their posts by tagging each other, so it doesn't look completely native, but it can be neat. You can also follow PeerTube channels directly in Piefed.

In short, it's quite complicated - there are different platforms, and they all solve interoperability differently and prioritize it to different degrees. There's always the possibility that Mastodon users will stop by and say hello, but how easy it is made for them to do so varies quite a lot.

I have only observed Lemmy->Mastodon and Mastodon->Lemmy

If I follow a community, in mastodon it will show as boosts and will show Title + link to the original post with all the comments also as boosts. It has some probability of working. Not always. I couldn't get hashtags to work.

If someone mentions some lemmy community it will get federated into that community but only into first mentioned community. The first line of a microblog will be set as a title. When users write hashtags and mentions first, it will be unreadable. Not all replies will get federated back and forth.

P.S. I have seen kbin [R.I.P] (Long Live Mbin) posts on lemmy and it worked good

ActivityPub addressing is really somewhat complex and pretty much any server is going to abstract it with things like at-mentions, sometimes making different assumptions. When I reply to lemmy posts from my microblog.pub server, I sometimes need to make sure to include both the user (@elena@lemmy.world) and community (@fediverse@lemmy.world) if they happen to be on different domains. Otherwise my server's addressing won't send it to the right place. And I doubt other lemmy instances will see this post unless I tag them too.

Its utter chaos some things federate some dont some federate in one direction but not the other some just mess with formatting. Someone really needs to come in and fix the whole mess. If i where to fix it id start with that flask implementation of lemmy then add whatever additional routes are required to make it simultaneously a mastodon server. The dream would be a single account that works across all federated services simultaneously federating the same post with the same comments across all front ends. Never going to happen tho sadly.

I'll add this info here.

https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/flipboard-fediverse-following/

One common problem for fediverse is that most of them are Western-oriented, hard to find people with similar interest and common topics.

Lemmy so far is replicating Reddit, which is tend to one-size-fit-all community. Gaming community? c/gaming is de-facto. Linux community? c/Linux is de-facto. And so on. Sure there are other server, but the one with most active community wins.

I usually use Facebook Groups with hundreds of thousands of people. It's nice to see groups of really small niche, like "local fried chicken seller," "temple research South East Asia," or "Singapore-only comic collector", etc.

There are plenty groups with similar topic, but entirely different culture. For example general gaming group:

1. Gaming group which predominantly SEA people where mobile gaming is common.
2. Gaming group with mainly Western people where mobile gaming is considered lesser form of gaming.
3. Gaming group with audience where anime-manga-tokusatsu and other Japanese pop culture are mainstream. (Taiwanese, Indonesian, Korean, etc)

Another example, healthy food groups.

1. Healthy food groups with people from area where vegan food is common without labeling (e.g. India, Indonesia, Myanmar, East Timor).
2. Healhy food groups with predominantly Westerner that try to replace all food to vegan food.
3. Healhy food groups that revolves around local food, which its recipe are only suitable for certain region.

All these communities might be same, but the entire vibe are different. One might more welcoming, other are full or rough jokes, some are okay with multilanguge post (not English only community).

Unless fediverse is able to replicate this, I don't think it will reach full mainstream, especailly for people in Africa, Middle East, or Asia.

Edit: I also want to see Misskey Channel interoperability, as it has the closest vibe so far with Facebook Groups.

Testing out comment federation, please don't mind me 🙈

Pinging @_elena@mastodon.social @elena@friendica.opensocial.space and @elenarossini@pixelfed.social (because, why not) 🙈

Cool

I tested/wrote about it recently, you're welcome to copy my metaphorical homework if you want

Friendica Side

(I'm getting an Nginx error trying to load Nerdica, hopefully it'll be back up soon)

Lemmy Side

Cross Compatibility portion of blog post

The long in the short of it is that Lemmy can communicate with Mastodon & Friends, though since Activity Pub servers handle everything and microblogging platforms have no clue what Lemmy is doing there's a bit of jank.

You can post to a community by "@"ing it, although it can only be a text based submission. You can follow a community by following it's name (say @fediverse@lemmy.ml) and you'll get submissions in the form of boosts/reposts. You can also grab a link to a post or reply and search for that on a microblogging server to reply to or like.

My test went pretty well, although the post I made was slightly wonky (title and "@" appeared in the post text). I also didn't see all the Lemmy replies make it back to my home server. If nomadic identities make their way to activity pub most of the jank could be resolved.

As for a testimonial about compatibility something that sticks out is cross compatibility between Activity Pub, Nostr, and AT (BlueSky). I'm usually on Nostr, but I follow Activity Pub and AT accounts; and thanks to a copying of a json file you can search out the same username on Activity Pub or Nostr and find my Nostr account.

one more interoperability test, this time from Lemmy.world to a self-hosted new Friendica instance. Hello @jerry@my-place.social - let me know if you get this! 👋