Viewing a group from Lemmy like @fediverse on Mastodon looks like a weird stream of retoots / boosts. That’s probably going to confuse some folks as Lemmy & Kbin & friends take off
Just because the ActivityPub protocol lets Lemmy and Mastodon interact doesn’t necessarily mean they should… Of course, I say that as we interact between the two!! It’s an interesting design dilema that I’m sure will receive more thought as the platforms grow
@vhstape @lmorchard What it means is that every interesting conversation also adds an interesting conversation to Mastodon.
People can interact with those discussions on the platform that suits them best.
So if you’re an ex-Twitter user on Mastodon, it appears as a post. If you’re an ex-Redditor on Lemmy, it appears as a thread.
And the magic of the Fediverse is that those ex-Redditors can engage with ex-Twitter users in conversations that wouldn’t take place had they remained on Twitter or Reddit.
Yes, you are totally right! I do think that there is an ideological disconnect, though, since Lemmy is more of a long-form text site and Mastodon is more of a podium-and-audience deal. Perhaps if content was “cross posted” instead, that might help separate things. Just rolling off the top of my head
That’s the beauty of the Fediverse: you don’t have to force anyone to be in the same platform to interact with each other, just like e-mail. Everybody is free to choose the service they prefer without cutting ties with other people.
Friendica and Hubzilla go even further because they can reach Diaspora.
@joaopinheiro and Bluesky soon, lol
Yeah, I checked the Github and there are a few open issues right now labeled ‘enhancements’ and ‘federation’ which talk about how posts from Mastodon (and other software) should be displayed on Lemmy and vice versa. So it’s at least on the radar and a known problem from the Lemmy side.
Honestly the biggest problem for me with reading Lemmy threads from the Mastodon end is exactly what the OP said, but I have no clue if Eugen plans to change how post threads are displayed in timelines on Mastodon and its forks.
Yeah, it would be nice if Mastodon eventually handled rendering group threads a little better and meet something like Lemmy part way. I can imagine that different kinds of services using activitypub will end up looking strange through each others’ lenses, but there could be some interesting crossovers
(Also I kinda forgot that my post from a mastodon instance would show up like a top-level post over here 😅)
As I understand it, kbin was the software boosting every post whenever you clicked the upvote button, while Lemmy uses the bookmark/favorite/star feature which is a lot less disruptive to timeline based clients like Mastodon. Based on that I think Lemmy and Mastodon should interoperate just fine, though you’ll need an app with threading support like Fedilab for comment chains to make any sense.
The software behind kbin has been changed just two days ago so this problem should resolve itself once all the (big) kbin instances have updated their code software.