I’ve seen some mention that Lemmy has inter-op with other platforms supporting ActivityPub, but so far I’ve not really seen this in action, or even in how it works.
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@ItzzMe hi from mastodon! I searched the url of your post and can reply from mastodon.sdf.org
Really? I tried this kind of thing a bit earlier, maybe it’s because I didn’t use an URL? Whatever it was, it’s pretty cool to see the inter-op.
For me it’s more than pretty cool. It’s like watching the invention of email.
This is the start of a world where applications are distributed and nobody owns your data. It’s the exact opposite of what the big tech mafia has made all their billions on.
All it needs now is prettier clients and the masses will come.
That and better spam filtering. It’s fine now, but it’ll get bad once they catch on
One way I found out is that you can copy a link to a Lemmy community, e.g https://lemmy.ml/c/linux and paste it into Mastodon search bar and you can the follow it from Mastodon, same for user links. Similarly you can copy a post link from Lemmy and can comment and favourite it.
You’ve gotten some technical answers, but here’s a bit of context about user-experience:
- From Mastodon…
- A Lemmy community looks like a mastodon user. You can post to the community by at-mentioning the user. The first line of the toot becomes the post name, the rest of the toot becomes the post body. If you ever see posts with the title
@communityname, you can bet that’s a mastodon user who didn’t format their toot in a way that maximizes readability on Lemmy. - Existing posts from Lemmy look like toot threads in Mastodon, with each comment as a toot. You can reply to a comment by replying to the toot. Again, if you see a comment beginning with the username being replied to, it’s a decent bet that reply is from a mastodon user.
- A Lemmy community looks like a mastodon user. You can post to the community by at-mentioning the user. The first line of the toot becomes the post name, the rest of the toot becomes the post body. If you ever see posts with the title
- From kbin, Lemmy communities look like magazines, I think… and behave pretty much like communities.
Other apps may interoperate differently, or may just feel a bit broken depending on the specifics of how it uses ActivityPub compared to Lemmy.
That’s real interesting, I was under the assumption that mastodon users were limited to plain comments.
Also, kbin, I know nearly nothing about it, what’s it about?
Also, kbin, I know nearly nothing about it, what’s it about?
It aims to unify the community-ness of Lemmy and the tooty-ness of mastodon in a single app/account. The community bits aim to be quite similar to Lemmy as far as I know. I believe the registered user count was under 2000 earlier this week, though, so it’s MUCH smaller than the Lemmy community and I think a lot of what people use it for is to connect to Lemmy communities. Admittedly, I don’t really know what I’m talking about though. I decided to go with the more established ecosystem in Lemmy and didn’t dig too deep beyond skimming the webpage when I was shopping for a fediverse app/instance.
Details at https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
- From Mastodon…
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Not an expert, but what I’ve pieced together over the past year:
ActivityPub platforms work on a subscribe-and-wait model, similar to a magazine or newspaper subscription. You find an ‘actor’ on another server you want to receive content from and you follow them. This sends a signal to your server that you want to see that actor’s posts in your streams, and if your server is not currently receiving content from that actor, then it should request that the actor’s host server send any posts they publish along. Your local server then stores and hosts those posts locally, as if they had originated from the server (but with pointers back to the original host, so that replies can be forwarded back to the original poster).
These actors can be other users, or they can be groups (which is what Lemmy communities are), which work by receiving posts addressed to them and then forwarding them along to subscribers.
Your local server infrastructure may allow you to subscribe to users, or to groups, or to both. And they may play host to users, or to groups, or to both. Lemmy hosts both users and groups, but only allows users to subscribe to groups. Friendica and /kbin host both users and groups, and allow users to subscribe to both. Mastodon hosts only users, but allows users to subscribe to both users and groups. And Guppe and Chirp host only groups.
This and the email analogy has helped me understand how all these fediverse apps interact. Thanks for the explanation.
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