this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
30 points (96.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43411 readers
1527 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wow did not know that. So how can it interact with the lemmy instances if it's not running lemmy software?
Because they use the same protocol: ActivityPub
For example, E-Mail gets send over the protocols pop3, smtp, imap. It doesn't matter if you use Outlook or Gmail for Android or whatever email program. They still send data to each other using these protocols. Therefor both know what to do with the information exchanged.
There is software that is completely different from Lemmy and Kbin which can still interact via the ActiviyPub protocol. For example Mastodon for Twitter-like mini blogs. Or PeerTube which is a video platform. Pixelfeed is an image sharing platform similar to Instagram and the like. But since they all use AcitvityPub you can interact, comment, vote etc. on these images and videos or mastodon posts here on Kbin or on Lemmy.
In theory this sounds great. But obviously the different software needs to have the backend and the UI to support these features implemented.
To make it all even more difficult to implement, since all these different installations are spread over many different servers (= federation). Which all can have difference in their software again and different speed and rules about how often they synchronize their data.
Not only can this Reddit talk to that Reddit, it can also talk to the various Twitters, and YouTubes. Twitter can also talk to Instagram, Facebooks, and Goodreads, etc. That's the magic of the fediverse!
The ActivityPub protocol! It's how all these platforms talk to each other.
That's the magic of ActivityPub! It's the protocol that most of the fediverse is built on, and it lets users from completely different fediverse platforms share posts with each other. It's the special sauce that lets Mastodon, Lemmy, and kbin (and more!) work together
Via the ActivityPub protocol that fediverse software uses :)
Pretty cool stuff!
Kbin can also directly interact with Mastodon users and toots because of this. Kbin magazines can natively contain both “threads” from Kbin and Lemmy, and microblog “posts” from Kbin and Mastodon. (And other software depending how they map these features.)
It’s part of the fediverse, things like mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, and kbin can communicate with each other because they all use activitypub. It’s a fun rabbit hole to explore if you have time