Here’s the thing. I’m a mod for a small-time community for a niche interest, !castles@lemm.ee I’m also on Mastodon, and was before my Reddit exodus. I follow #castles as well as a few other related topics on Matsodon, so I get quality toots, such as this: https://mastodon.scot/@McNige/110926238926867959, that I wish I could just crosspost over to my community. Currently, I have to repackage the toot, which isn’t a huge problem, but currently I just drop them a note on Mastodon that their content has been posted elsewhere on the Fediverse. What would be nice is if people who comment on the Lemmy post also get fed into OP’s toot. More sharing, more connection, more activity.

On the flip side, I’ve subscribed to @castles@lemm.ee on my Mastodon instance and, while it’s good to be able to follow posts in feed form, it looks like ass: Lemmy post crossposted to Mastodon I realize I should try this with Pixelfed, but I haven’t made that leap yet.

I don’t know, am I thinking crazy here? I’d think we’d want everything in the Fediverse soup interoperable in a more seemless way. Is this a feature request or am I missing some way to do this better?

  • kglitch@kglitch.social
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    10 months ago

    The ActivityPub protocol makes it possible, but most apps only make use of the pieces of ActivityPub that suit them. For example, in Lemmy they lean heavily on the Group actor type as the basis for Communities, which Mastodon doesn’t use at all. Peertube creates content using the Video activity type, while Mastodon only creates content in the form of a Note activity. Lemmy produces a lot of Link activities, which get rendered into a Note when viewed in Mastodon. And so on.

    It’s all a work in progress and I’m confident integration will get better over time. The framework is there.

    Kbin has limited support for Mastodon posts but it’s UI is still very much focused on the reddit-style functionality.

    • Ken Oh@lemm.eeOP
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      10 months ago

      OK, thanks for the info. I’m glad people have the same thoughts. I hope your confidence pays off, for all of our sakes’.

  • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I 100% agree with this. I don’t really know the solution or even understand all the federation details of why they don’t interoperate better, but it’s definitely irritating to me that as far as I know, I can’t:

    • Be on Lemmy and follow Mastodon people
    • Be on Mastodon and follow a Lemmy community and start to see posts to that community in my feed.

    It’s, like, so close to just being a single global software-agnostic communication place that anyone can rock with. But it’s not. If anyone knows any solution I can use that can do some facsimile of both of those things please let me know (someone suggested Friendica as a solution but I haven’t really looked into it in detail yet).

    (Edit: Be on Mastodon and follow a Lemmy community and start to see posts in a way that’s not ridiculous. Just have the community show up as an Actor, posts come from the user that posted them and the community Actor “retoots” them or whatever. No I don’t know the internal details of why that way is hard to do or doesn’t make sense, that’s just how I want it to be.)

    • Ken Oh@lemm.eeOP
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      10 months ago

      Yes, so close is exactly what I’m thinking too. Let’s hope it gets there soon, before reddit’s next big fuck-up to push everyone away (birdsite is doing a pretty good keeping up with fucking up, so less worries there).

    • Die4Ever@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      Be on Mastodon and follow a Lemmy community and start to see posts in a way that’s not ridiculous.

      I don’t think it’s that ridiculous? I mean I see the post title and user its from, with the link to the post. I wouldn’t expect Mastodon to show a huge post in the middle of my feed of all the little toots, so idk what more I could ask for

      https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Die4Ever@programming.dev/110939335701439601

      https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Die4Ever@programming.dev/110939335701439601/reblogs

      edit: incognito seems to cause those links to automatically redirect? which is maybe a good feature actually?

      • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        So, if I try to follow /c/technology@lemmy.world from my Mastodon account, then when I pop open my feed what shows at the top is this:

        I don’t want /c/technology to “boost” individual posts (edit: comments) from that sub such that they show up with no context in my feed. If what happened was that individual posts from the sub showed in my feed, and comments on the post showed up as replies under that post, that would be swell. IDK the technical details of the issue, or if there’s anything I can do on my end to make this work better, but in my limited experimentation it looks like I just can’t follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon without ruining my feed with these individual context-less comments.

        • Die4Ever@programming.dev
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          10 months ago

          Yes I do see communities boosting the comments too, they are marked as replies properly if I click on them. You’re right though there’s no way for Mastodon to follow a community without your feed getting filled with comments instead of just posts.

          But I think the community needs to boost the comments in order for them to federate properly, so idk if there’s a nice way that this could be solved.

  • Anafroj@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    It’s totally not crazy thinking. :) I think the main problem is that while Mastodon and Lemmy implement the server to server part of ActivityPub, they don’t implement the client to server part of the standard, and instead build their own REST API and client. This is why, while you can subscribe to actors from an other application, it looks bad : it’s supposed to be consumed in their own client, or something that tries to emulate it (that, and the fact that they each implement their own extensions to ActivityPub, it doesn’t help).

    In a perfect world, ActivityPub based applications would implement the client to server part or the standard too, so that we have a multitude of third party clients that can consume data from any ActivityPub based application without looking broken. I certainly hope we go in this direction in the future, because interoperability looks half-baked, as it is right now, and the fediverse would be just more awesome with such upgrade.

    • ShittyKopper [they/them]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      10 months ago

      Nah that’s not it. It’s just AP is extremely broad and Mastodon only cares about a hyper-specialized subset of it. AFAIK even with things like writefreely (which serves Page objects as opposed to Note objects which are what Mastodon uses for microblog posts) it first “converts” them to extremely long Notes and then handles federation that way.

      From what I know other implementations such as the *omas or Friendica are a bit more lax and generally have wider compatibility with non-microblogging AP.

  • Arotrios@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    Kbin combines both, and does a good job segregating the different types of content. Lemmy reddit style posts are collected under the Threads category, and Mastodon Toots (tweet style) are collected under the Microblog category. The software is new, so there are bugs, but it provides a wider experience than either platform on its own. If you’re looking for a smaller instance running on kbin software, I also recommend https://kglitch.social.

    • Ken Oh@lemm.eeOP
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      10 months ago

      Hah, you’d think, but everyone else makes it seem like not yet.

  • gandalf_der_12te@feddit.de
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    10 months ago

    It should be possible, if someone implemented a proxy protocol. Just automatically take stuff from one side and duplicate/link it to the other side. Not sure if somebody has already started an implementation for this. If not, i guess it’s not very far away.