🚀 A little guide on how to communicate with #Lemmy from #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Sharkey etc
(this is the English translation of this German post: anonsys.net/display/bf69967c-1… If something is linguistically incorrect or incomprehensible, please let me know)
Lemmy is a kind of forum software in the #Fediverse: You can subscribe to forums (called ‘communities’ in Lemmy), share links and participate in discussions. @Tealk and I have described it in more detail (in German) here.
On the one hand, you can follow #Lemmy accounts, in which case the posts will appear in your timeline and you can reply to them, share them, etc.
On the other hand, you can also create posts in Lemmy communities from Mastodon etc.
Follow a community:
The easiest way is to type the account name in full into the search or copy the URL into the search field. This applies to communities (e.g. [ät]fediversede@feddit.de) and Lemmy accounts (e.g. @caos is my Lemmy account) as well as to individual posts in Lemmy (e.g. feddit.org/post/201081 is a post in Lemmy).
Creating posts in communities:
You can create posts in Lemmy communities by tagging the community account
(It should be a public post)
If the community account is tagged with @, it will share the post and the post will also appear in the forum.
For example, this is a post I created from Mastodon in feddit’s #Tischtennis forum: metalhead.club/@caos/112749905… … and this is how it is displayed in Lemmy: feddit.org/post/556495
The only thing to note from Mastodon and Akkoma etc. is: The beginning of the post/the first paragraph becomes the title of the forum post, as Mastodon does not have a heading field. (see also: Instructions Creating a post from Mastodon)
So it is best to start the post like this (see image 1):
This is my headline (as descriptive a title as possible)
@community@lemmy-instance
This is the further text, link etc.
if necessary a picture (only in the initial post a picture is transferred from Mastodon to Lemmy, between Lemmy and Friendica all images in answers are transferred in the meantime)
Send post to multiple communities / groups at the same time
The post can only be sent to one Lemmy community at a time. If several community accounts are tagged, the post will only appear in the last one mentioned. If several different group accounts are tagged in a post, the Lemmy account should come first. According to my tests, it works in the following order: 1. lemmy community 2. friendica forum 3. a.gup.pe group . Then all groups share the post, otherwise it doesn’t work with all of them so far.
Search for communities
You can search for interesting forums/communities either on an instance page or here in the ‘Lemmy Explorer’ (see image 2).
If you are interested, enter the URL in the search field and follow the account.
If you have found an interesting community, you can copy its URL into the search field to follow the community account (see image 3) or enter the handle of the account in the form @communityname@lemmy-instance (in Friendica etc. also with !).
The past posts are then often not displayed, but those that come in the future will appear in your timeline.
What is not possible from Mastodon etc. is to create your own community. This requires a Lemmy or kbin account. Otherwise almost everything works (except for pictures in replies, which are not federated, see in detail (in German) here).
If you follow many or very active communities, it can get a bit confusing, especially in Mastodon. A clearer view is available if you view it on the page of the community itself, i.e. open it externally in the browser.
(the original URL of posts is sometimes hidden behind the #Fediverse logo)
There are also other public groups in the #Fediverse, e.g. Friendica-Forums and kbin-Magazines, which work in a similar way.
I really hope you don’t. Lemmy is a particular type of community and it’s already being filled with unnecessary and annoying tags and hashtags. They really don’t mesh well together.
Every Fediverse content looks a little different, depending on which access software or app you use to view it. It seems that there are also Lemmy apps that display hashtags a little too exaggerated, while in others and in the web-gui it is ok. (in an earlier version of the guide it also said that you shouldn’t use hashtags/tags esp. in the headline because it didn’t work properly back then).
But maybe I should include a note in the instructions that hashtags should be used sparingly or placed at the end?
It doesn’t matter what software you use. There’s no point to hashtags on Lemmy. It’s just a fundamentally different platform in that way. And I find it incredibly annoying that Masto, Twitter, and other microblogging platforms will tag everyone who was ever involved in a thread. Character limits are stupid and remove all nuance from any conversation. Not to mention all those automated tags eat into your character limits and just add a bunch of clutter for no reason. If you reply to someone on Lemmy, they get a notification, so the only time you need to tag someone is if you want them to see your comment and you didn’t reply specifically to them.
I’m not a big fan of Mastodon either (started with it, but now prefer Friendica and Lemmy), for me personally it’s not a good fit. But hashtags on Mastodon are at least a way to follow not just individual users but also topics (and this only works if they are hashtagged). With Friendica, Sharkey and others, you can define your own individual channels / antennas for certain topics, so hashtags and individual accounts are not so important. And for Lemmy, they’re not important at all. But as a Lemmy user, I can still put up with it when I see a hashtag (that gives others an advantage). What’s so bad about seeing it?
And stop using all those fucking hashtags because it posts to communities.
And stop “@ing” people when you reply to them.
The only reason I clicked this was the hope you all had started realizing this so I’d get to stop blocking you all for the spam.
It’s not complicated but everyone from a twitter knockoff I’ve tried to explain it to, just can’t seem to fucking understand and come up with crazy conspiracies that bots are doing it.
honestly hashtags is 100% lemmy’s fault: groups/communities are “audience” AP field, lemmy some time ago aiming to be “more compatible with mastodon” made it so that posts in communities get automatically added an hashtag, and hashtags get sent into communities. this is honestly stupid and should be undone, you’d better aim your anger at lemmy devs.
regarding mentions, Twitter-like software needs them for addressing: lemmy implies that replies are addressed to replied-to user, other software doesn’t (you may want to contribute to a conversation without mentioning user directly above). if they don’t mention, you don’t see it, you’ll have to just deal with this. you could cook yourself a client that finds mentions in object “tag” and removes them from the body itself if you care this much
Hashtags is how a majority(?) of the rest of the fediverse works to find “like” things. Lemmy and Lemmy like software are the strange ones in how it works with posts.
It would be nice if our user profiles had an option “show hashtags” so that users that want to see the hashtags can and those that don’t won’t. Best of both worlds. Make it account specific. It also allows people to post on the rest of the fediverse AND Lemmy in how both expect.
You must be fun at parties.
Username does NOT check out. You give too many.
You can block the main mastodon instances if you find it THAT horrible. No more hashtags in your feed then.
Look at the instance OP is from, it’s not one of the big twitter knockoffs.
If there’s a way to block every twitter knockoff at once I’d love to hear it, but unfortunately I think you just didn’t understand what’s happening and won’t be able to actually help anyone…
You just seem to want an argument
Look at the instance OP is from, it’s not one of the big twitter knockoffs.
Their target audience is Mastodon users though, not Lemmy. And Mastodon requires hashtags for discovery. OP is just writing their post in a way that it can be found by Mastodon users.
Okay fediverse, you’ve been told. It has been requested that everyone on the whole network stops using #hashtags because one lemmy.world user finds it personally inconvenient the way their instance’s software deals with it. I expect everyone to comply immediately.
