this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Lemmy, kbin, and Mastodon all speak the same underlying protocol -- ActivityPub. I've found that the best way to think of it is to compare it to email. If I send you an email from my gmail account to your outlook account, it just works (well, mostly, email is a bit of a mess lol) even though the two email clients look vastly different from each other. ActivityPub (and federated protocols in general) are like email, but for twitter/reddit.
There are some different message types (it wouldn't make sense to present twitter-like content in the context of a threaded forum like Reddit), and not all instance types support all the different message types. I'm using kbin (via kbin.social) and I can see Mastodon content, but I'm not sure if Lemmy has that ability.
Not sure if that was helpful, and I hope that others come and fact check me, but that's my understanding of it.
Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. I didn't know they spoke the same underlying protocol.
For fun and experimentation, I'm answering you from my Kbin account. I feel like a kid in a candy store playing with this new technology. Maybe Reddit's suicide-by-greed is not entirely a bad thing.
I agree. I'm sad at the loss of my 12 year account over there and all the information it had built up. I'm sad to lose my niche hobby communities (for now). Even with that, I'm really hopeful that federated social media will eventually take off. Now we just need to make sure that major corporate interests don't dig their gross claws into it (Meta is apparently making plans to do so).
I feel like Meta going into the fediverse shows that they can see the tide rising on decentralized social media. My main concern with the Meta instance is more about whether or not they'll support account migration.
To me, the killer feature of the fediverse is the account migration. (it's coming eventually to kbin)
Sure it's nice (actually awesome) to see content from so many diverse communities... But the killer app is being able to move to a new server when you need to and get your followers to automatically follow you at the new location. This prevents enshittification to a large degree, because there's no lock-in network effects.
Kbin may allow migrating between Kbin instances, but would they support migration to Lemmy instances? If not then not sure we could expect Meta to support it either.
Pure speculation but I think a likely scenario is Meta would have all their accounts registered on a centralised server, and only have the content decentralised.
Wanna try something crazy? Go to a mastodon instance like this one and put
@[email protected]on the searchbar there.or do the inverse, look for someone local to mastodon, like
@[email protected]and search in our searchbar. Result.I think this works even for unfederated things, then by doing that you end up federating them to the whole server.
edit: I say this because sometimes I tried searching for something/someone specific on another domain and nothing came up :S
To get the initial federation going, some kind of "subscribing" action has to take place, e.g. following a user.
What is really cool is that you can mix and match features, like if you follow a Mastodon user on Misskey and vice versa, the Mastodon user can see the Misskey users full 5000 character post, even though Mastodon is limited to 500 chars.