this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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77
Is better/seemless integration with Mastodon (and perhaps more) possible? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Here's the thing. I'm a mod for a small-time community for a niche interest, [email protected] 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 @[email protected] 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?

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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'.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year 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 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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/@[email protected]/110939335701439601

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@[email protected]/110939335701439601/reblogs

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So, if I try to follow /c/[email protected] 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 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

At least I'm not crazy. Glad you agree.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This guy loves kglitch too…🤔
https://kglitch.social/u/Trolljegeren

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well how about that. Looks like he's got your scent. Sweet dreams, and remember to wear your sunscreen.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can smell this comment

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Victory?

U ok bud?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just living rent free in your head, lil man. Go ahead and have your nap now. You must be tired after that big tantrum of downvote spam, and you gotta start early tomorrow if you're gonna keep up.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You tagged me in this thread… but you’re living “rent free in my head”?? I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with you personally outside of a weird DM you sent me a month ago.

Seriously man are you ok?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

You decided to spam downvote multiple posts before you were banned from our forum. Then you continued to do so, after being blocked and banned, on my reasonable comments against racism, transphobia, and about law outside the forum (including one comment that was nothing but the text of the 14th amendment), proving yourself in the process to be a racist, a transphobe, and an absolutely idiotic fascist who doesn't realize that kbin lets everyone see what you downvote.

I feel it's my civic duty to call your dumbass out, as you're clearly an unhinged, vengeance driven stalker who's likely doing the same or worse to other users.

As to the reverse trolling, I'll know I'm out of your head when you stop spam downvoting (which is really a useless effort, as you're gonna need at least another 2k downvotes a week to keep up). Calling you out on your dumbass nazi self is just icing on the cake.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Hey Arotrios, sorry for what you have to go through. I imagine you already know that, but I think it's worth reminding you : you can hide upvotes/downvotes in Lemmy's preferences by unticking the "show scores" option. That way, stalking and serial downvoting is just wasting the abuser time and finger's articulations. :) Honestly, rating everything people say is a toxic feature anyway, it's both addictive and generating anxiety. I'm glad Lemmy allows to disable it, I'm way more at peace since I've done it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

@anafroj Thanks for the kind words and advice - much appreciated. Unfortunately on Kbin (where I run my forum) we don't have that option - the software exceeds lemmy in many ways, but there are number of lemmy features (including removing downvotes) that I'd like to see on Kbin. I'm glad that the solution worked for you and your users.

To compensate on Kbin, since the forum I run is built as be a safe space for creative folks to submit OC and their inspirations, one of our rules is that if you downvote, you need to leave a comment explaining why. This allows critique without anonymous negativity, which adds nothing to the discussion.

As for myself, I don't care that the trolls above are obsessed with downvoting what my profile posts (which literally says "For Amusement Purposes Only" at the top - another indication that they can't read properly).

They tell more on themselves than I with the downvote spam, and it actually helps drive engagement with my commentary because they're triggering the "activity" sorting algorithm - it's not like reddit where enough downvotes will actually hide anything. But neither troll is smart enough to realize this, so that's why I just smile and tell them to keep digging. If they keep going, I get more upvotes through the additional views than they could possibly downvote, so that's a win from my perspective. If they get tired and stop, that's a bit of a win as well, even though they're no longer contributing to my marketing campaign... ;)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, my bad, I have yet to get used to the fact that we're having the same discussions over different apps. :)

If you can install custom stylesheets (some options are documented here), I've tested this rule to work for removing downvotes:

.vote__down { display: none !important; }

It will work only for you, though, not for other people on your forum (unless you're an instance owner and can change the website stylesheets file).

An other rule to remove upvotes if you want to:

.vote__up { display: none !important; }
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Holy shit - you're brilliant. It took some tweaking, but this code works on kbin:

{span style="color:#323232;"}.vote__down { display: none !important; } {/span}

I'm going to go and post this solution in @kbinMeta (if you don't do it first) - there are a lot of mods that want this functionality. I and our users thank you! Consider this an open invitation to @13thFloor if you'd ever like to stop by.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You're welcome, if I did my part to fight online harassment, this is a good day. :) You should consider legal action, though, if you have laws against that in your country (I assume it's most countries, nowadays?). The instance of this or those guys can be subpoenaed to provide their IP address, which then can be used to uncover their identity.

Thanks for the invitation, btw. The whole concept sounds fun. :) I enjoyed the article about imagination engine, it's on the edge of phenomenology, but still keeping things rational (I have a history with phenomenology 😅). I have my own way of exploring my imagination (written solo RPGs, it's basically how I spent my evenings), but I'll have fun reading your content. :) Enjoy!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You just introduced me into an entirely new field of study. Phenomenology wasn't even mentioned in my philosophy or history of consciousness studies back in college. I'm going through the wikipedia on the field now and it describes in amazing detail the line of reasoning behind the imagination engine. If you have more sources on it that you enjoy, please feel free to forward them or post them to the @13thFloor.

The same goes for your RPGs - they're more than welcome if you feel they're ready for public consumption. In fact, this comment made me realize that we're very RPG light right now, so that's a great content idea to start including.

Oh, and regarding removing the downvotes, I lost one sub who was vocal about the change on the thread I posted in kbinMeta about how to do it, then gained 5 more afterwards. I've got a thread up to see how the community feels about it, but no comments yet, so I think the change is a positive one. I'll probably make it permanent unless one of our regular contributors complains.

This has been one of the most positive interactions I've had on the Fediverse, which is kinda funny as it was spawned in reaction to troll harassment. You've got my thanks yet again - it's been a good day as a result.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, ok, your article sounded so close I thought it was inspired by it. :) It's a very european thing, mostly developed in Germany and France. I have by blood with it, though. I've always been more interested in analytical philosophy so I didn't like it. Which shouldn't have been a problem, there are many schools of philosophy, right? Except I studied at a university where the philosophy department was specialized in it. Every day I was wondering what I was doing there. :) I actually consider it wasted my university years, so I'm probably not the good person to talk to you about it. 😅 (but your own articles stopped short of talking non-sense like phenomenology does in my opinion, so it was good to read, it's like taking only the good parts of phenomenology ;) ). The main authors, if you want to know more, are Heidegger, Husserl and Sartre. A note of warning though that it's very hard to read (well, at least if you have an analytical mind, I suspect it depends on people personality).

The same goes for your RPGs - they’re more than welcome if you feel they’re ready for public consumption

Oh, no, thanks. Actually, not being ready for public consumption is their whole point. :) I used to write (as an amateur) when I was younger, only to be confronted to a wall of indifference at each publication. So I was going back to it, doing my best, putting unreasonable amount of hours to make it likable, and still this indifference - in part because, I realized later, my folks just didn't like reading anyway. But it turned out that trying to please people was a terrible experience. Nobody was having fun, including me. When I started playing my RPGs solo, the reason why I enjoyed it so much was because I put this simple rule : nobody will ever read it. From there, I don't have to ask myself questions like "is it too long?", "is it too short?", "is it properly explained?", "does the pace progress fast enough?", etc. I'm just exploring and enjoying it. :) My oldest campaign (I play three different games) has a word count that would cover at least three novels, and it would be terribly boring to read, because of the slow moving pace, the returns to previous places that break the pace, the long sequences when there is just no narrative arc, the pages and pages of shopping narration, etc. And I don't care, because it's not meant to be read. :) I'm not writing, I'm exploring my imagination, spending just as much time I want where I want, with no regard to what makes an efficient story - or even just legible text, for the matter. It's basically a videogame powered by imagination. :) The day I even consider it may be read, all of that collapses.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Kurt Vonnegut advises doing exactly what you're doing with your RPGs. The end of that lecture touches specifically on it.

I completely understand about keeping that part of your work private. I have done much the same thing for the same reasons with the vast majority of my creations, and you're wise to protect the part of yourself that keeps your imagination flowing.

That being said, should you reach a point where you're ready to share work (RPGs, writing, or just things that inspire you), the magazine is always open to you.

Re: Philosophy - I agree on the difficulty of the writing. I've read some small amount of Sartre (Being and Nothingness), but I remember being frustrated at the density of the arguments, which often seemed an over-articulation of the obvious for the sake of precision - and the entire work felt like a response to work we hadn't covered. In my college classes, it was presented as existentialism (in fact, we went from Descartes to Hume to Sartre), and now, looking at it's place in phenomenology, I feel robbed that the connections to Husserl and Heidegger weren't properly illustrated - the historical context would have helped me finish the book. Looks like I'll have to give it another shot :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Oh wow, thanks for that video, that was brilliant. :D

Indeed, if you had a teacher who made your class read Being and Nothingness without explaining phenomenology first, it feels like punishment or something. :) Not that Husserl and Heidegger are easier to read, but at least they don't presuppose other readings to be understood. That being said, I kind of get it, existentialism can be seen as its own thing, especially in Sartre's non-philosophy work (he wrote several novels and theater scripts). But not through Being and Nothingness. 😂

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He literally calls me out in threads every couple days because I downvoted something in his subreddit once.

It’s weird, creepy behavior. Don’t encourage him.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You got banned because you spam downvoted multiple comments without commentary, then continued the behavior after being asked to back up your downvotes with comments. You've escalated and continued the conflict by following me around the Fediverse downvoting my comments outside the forum - for over two weeks now. I will continue to call you out until your weird and creepy behavior stops.

You can play innocent all you'd like, but there's literally a public paper trail of your behavior, that any one can see by going through my comments and seeing the same two sad little trolls who downvote every comment they can.

You want me to go away, get the fuck out of my life. That's it.

You don't want to? Fine, I'll use your downvotes to call out your history as a racist, transphobe, fascist bigoted idiot again and again and again, because each time I do, folks are appreciative of being warned of your behavior, and I end up with new followers and traffic. Besides, I have no moral problem stalking a known stalker to keep them from harassing someone else.

This ain't one you're gonna win kid. Take a hint and your pacifier and go home to mommy.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I’m not playing anything. There’s a “public trail” of your continual harassment lol

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Wow you sound… hinged…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seems like it must be possible. No idea how to do it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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