There have been some requests to make it possible for Mastodon users to create threads on Lemmy. At the moment this is not possible because Mastodon cant set the title field which is mandatory in Lemmy. The same problem affects other projects like Pleroma or Friendica (where title is optional).

It is unlikely that Mastodon would make any change in this regard, so a workaround in Lemmy would be necessary. I implemented such a workaround which makes the title optional when receiving a federated post, and uses the first line of the content instead. This workaround could also be made configurable per instance or per community.

But to be honest I am not sure the workaround is a good idea in general, as it could result in bad titles, and generally more low-quality posts. Thats why I want to know what the community thinks about it.

  • @0x1C3B00DA
    7•1 year ago

    Both platforms should try to resolve the missing fields in whatever way possible, even if that means extrapolating bodies to titles and vice versa.

    Super agree. I don’t even see this as a collision. The post we’re commenting on doesn’t have a link so doesn’t even cleanly fit as a link-aggregator post; it’s closer to a blog post. But I don’t think these distinctions matter. Arbitrary categories about what types of posts are allowed just limit things for no reason. I can understand developers needing to focus, but in this case it seems easy to take a microblog post (Note) and display it within Lemmy’s ui by resolving missing fields, like you said.

    I’m always in favor of more integration. My hope for the fediverse is every software accepts posts from every other software.