cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37748055
… where every platform communicates with every other platform. i’ve rarely ever seen a post from mastodon on here, and even if it’s technically possible, it doesn’t seem that it happens very often.
likewise, i’ve rarely if ever seen a post from lemmy on mastodon. these two platforms just don’t seem to interact much.
the fediverse is already very small. fragmenting it even further by having multiple services that basically don’t talk to each other is not good. we need to either (a) aggressively find a way to bridge certain lemmy communities to be more visible on mastodon, especially location-based communities, or (b) i think that i’ll have to decide to only use mastodon in the future, because that’s where all my irl-friends are (yes i have those too, i do not only exist in a terminally online state :) and because mastodon is bigger already and that’s why i think that it has a bigger chance of taking off.
so, what do i suggest should happen?
especially for location-based communities (australia, london, darmstadt, …) it should be more probable for people living in these locations to draw use out of the lemmy community. maybe it’s just a question of showing lemmy content from these communities on mastodon home pages, or auto-subscribing mastodon users to nearby lemmy communities. something like that.
@gandalf_der_13te hi, I’m a Mastodon user
@gandalf_der_13te I feel like Friendica does a much better job at integrating both groups (I.e. Lemmy communities) and microblogs than either lemmy or Mastodon and mbin sounds like it should but it’s really pretty lacking
i think that i’ll have to decide to only use mastodon in the future
Or switch to Mbin.
The promise of the Fediverse is not, has never been, and should never be read as, global, universal cross-communication. It is a network of social media networks, where small websites can syndicate like content with other small websites they want to share with.
This idea of sharing everything everywhere all at once is kind of a degenerate state,caused by a low population, and fueled by twenty years of people using absolutely unconsciencely huge social sites that have swallowed the web.
It should not be the end goal.
It probably shouldn’t be the start goal, but it’s too late for that.
Smaller sites, where people can build community, recognize and know each other, and create some kind of truly shared space, while also being able interact with tertiaty content of the same type outside the primary network is the promise of the fediverse.
You’re functionally complaining that, because your email client doesn’t play Tiktok videos, they have bith betrayed the promise of the Internet.
Mastodon is specialising in microblogging and, most importantly, interaction between single user accounts. It has absolutely no support for groups whatsoever.
Lemmy, in turn, is specialising in groups. And it has even less support for interaction between single users.
Mastodon users can theoretically subscribe to Lemmy communities. To them and to Mastodon, however, it’s like following a user. Lemmy requires a title for each new post which aren’t implemented in Mastodon (except for inbound Article-type objects).
Also, Mastodon has no support whatsoever for enclosed threaded conversations with exactly one post and otherwise comments. On Mastodon, everything is a post, and you have to jump through hoops to see an entire thread. If you want to reply to a post, and you want everyone in the thread to see your reply, you have to mention absolutely everyone who has participated in the thread so far.
Well, and then there are mentions which Mastodon automatically adds to replies, but which are unnecessary on Lemmy, as well as hashtags which are critically important for content discovery on Mastodon but entirely unsupported by Lemmy.
The other way around works even less because it’s absolutely impossible for Lemmy users to follow Mastodon accounts.
Part of this mess are development politics. The Lemmy devs aren’t even interested in properly federating with Mbin and PieFed, much less anything else that has groups and even less anything that doesn’t. Gargron’s goal has always been to make Mastodon appear to be the Fediverse proper, i.e. the Fediverse being a “decentralised walled garden” that only consists of Mastodon. And even if a Mastodon user was to stumble upon the non-Mastodon Fediverse, it was to look broken and inferior in comparison with Mastodon.
I don’t agree for Lemmy, they’ve shown some interest in working with and fixing bugs in relation to PieFed, Mbin, PeerTube, and to a lesser extent Mastodon (at least they added that hashtag feature).
But I agree with you for Mastodon, it almost seems like they want to push away the other platforms. It reminds me of the green bubbles in iMessage.
I don’t have a Lemmy account. When I post a comment to a Lemmy post, it’s from my Mastodon account.
I just don’t post comments very often.
Be careful—you’re getting a few things mixed up.
Lemmy is software built around the concept of “communities.” A Lemmy user isn’t focused on what individual users write; rather, they are interested in what is being posted within the specific communities that interest them!
Therefore, it makes perfect sense that you wouldn’t see content from Mastodon users if they haven’t consented to being visible to you.
In fact, if a Mastodon user chooses (via opt-out) to post within a Lemmy community, you will see that content—provided that you are also subscribed to that community.
Conversely, a Mastodon user will generally see your content in the following three scenarios:
- If they follow you, or if they follow someone who follows you.
- If they follow someone who “reposts” (or “retweets”) your content.
- If someone on your instance follows you, or follows someone who “reposts” your content.
Note that when I say “someone who reposts your content,” that “someone” could be another Mastodon user, but it could also be the Lemmy community where you are posting. In effect, these communities function as special ActivityPub users; Mastodon perceives them as such—for instance, the community
https://lemmy.world/c/fediverseappears to Mastodon as the user@fediverse@lemmy.world.Bridging the “social-verse” (social networks) and the “forum-verse” (discussion forums) has always been an important goal for me. I’ve made an effort to inform Mastodon users about this through posts like this one: https://www.informapirata.it/2024/01/02/mastodon-tips-how-to-use-friendica-groups-forums-and-lemmy-communities/
…but it’s clear that Mastodon users—and, more importantly, Mastodon administrators—aren’t particularly interested in connecting their users with communities on platforms like Lemmy, PieFed, MBin, or NodeBB. Fortunately, there are some positive developments on the social side:
- There is an app for Mastodon called “Raccoon for Friendica” that makes managing groups easier for Mastodon users. (It’s called “Raccoon for Friendica” because it originated for Friendica, but more importantly, its developer previously worked on an app for Lemmy.)
- A fork of Misskey called “Catodon” offers excellent support for ActivityPub groups, potentially ushering in a new era that bridges the “socialverse” and the “forumverse.”
There are also interesting updates on the forum side: NodeBB now allows administrators to forcibly “move” initial posts into a specific category (in NodeBB, “communities” are referred to as “categories,” but they still function as ActivityPub groups). While this move isn’t visible to other instances within the “forumverse” (such as Lemmy or other NodeBB instances), it is visible to “social” users—because the “category” effectively “boosts” the moved post, allowing social users who follow that community to see it.
I’m not familiar with Piefed, but it would be great if the Lemmy developers took two steps:
- Introduce a feature similar to NodeBB’s, allowing posts to be moved within a community.
- Find a way to make this move “visible” across the board—so that it’s not just users on the local instance or those on social platforms who see the change, but also users on other “forum” instances!
However, there could also be negative developments. The most likely risk, in my view, is that the “little dictator” (Mastodon) might decide to implement ActivityPub groups in its own idiosyncratic way—one that is, predictably, incompatible with the “forumverse.” Given how they implemented “quote-retweets,” I’d say that bad news is more likely than good news…
While I do agree that not all platforms show all content, I would rather put the blame it on Mastodon, which decided to do whatever it wants and not invest in ActivityPub, only use it for its own benefit. I’m not surprised other platforms went the same way, although it is incredibly saddenin.
Not so sure, i could subscribe from my Piefed account to Peertube channels, and get their videos in my feed. Im pretty sure it works from Lemmy too. And it feels like the Fediverse in action to me !
If you want both user-to-user interaction like on Mastodon and groups like on Lemmy, there are also Friendica and its still existing descendants. You get full-blown long-form blogging and a Fediverse event calendar on top for free.
My Mastodon feed is full of Lemmy posts, the reverse is less true.
That doesn’t really change the fact that they aren’t identical use-cases.
It’s quite trivial to follow a Lemmy community or user.from Mastodon. Then it’s just on your feed like normal. To post a new thread from Mastodon you just @ mention the community. On oirFed you can hashtag your post, too.
It’s really following Mastodon from Lemmy that’s a challenge. As there’s no mechanism to follow users or hashtags here.
i’ve had mastadon people interact with me on here, I think one followed me even. Not sure if I should’ve blocked them or not, I followed back. I think they had zero posts.
Should I block?
unless you looked at their profile on their home server, zero posts could have just been that posts don’t federate if nobody on your server had followed them before.
Idk. I don’t really interact with Bookwyrm or Funkwhale or Peertube or Wanderer users on masto and they don’t interact with me, but you’d be hard pressed to convince me any of them is violating the promise of the fediverse.
Peertube actually maps to Mastodon quite well. You can follow channels, and every time they post a new video, you get a small (or not) post with the video title, description and hashtags, and a link to watch the video on the original instance.
lemmy and mastodon are more than just activitypub frontends. mastodon is for microblogging where you follow users while lemmy and other threadiverse software is a discussion forum and news aggregator where you follow communities. it’s cool you can share some posts across these platforms but there is a reason you don’t see the same posts everywhere and that’s a good thing.
Piefed introduced following Mastodon users a few months ago: https://join.piefed.social/2026/07/03/piefed-v1-7-is-released-following-users-faster-browsing-smarter-moderation/
