this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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mastodon with lemmy (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hello, some people have told me that it is possible to see lemmy posts from mastodon. To me it makes a lot of sense to have a single app for whole fediverse. However, mastodon is not doing a good job at this.

Each time I look at my mastodon home feed, it is spammed with completely random posts from lemmy which do not even show up in the organised view wefwef/memmy provide. Is there any way how to take care of this?

For lemmy I have found wefwef and memmy to be actually quite good. Interface is simple and easy to use, posts look organised. On mastodon it just feels far worse, especially with lemmy connected.

Are there any alternatives to the official mastodon app that would allow better integration with lemmy? To me it seems logical to have a single app for both platforms as they use the same principle.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Mastodon and Lemmy both use the same underlying protocol, but are fundamentally different types of content with different paradigms for interacting with it.

There are folks working on combining the two into an app or platform - Kbin is one - but mashing the content together is going to give the garbage UX you describe.

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

Yeah, in Mastodon I follow specific accounts that I like to hear from.

In Lemmy I'm in communities to get the latest info on a topic, like the composting community I just found lol

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Exactly. Mastadon is about who is sharing, Lemmy is about what is being shared.

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

I get your point. I see the way of posting is quite different. mastodon has simpler posts.

So if there was a feature to interact via one app with both platforms, it would make more sense to approach this from the lemmy perspective

To be honest, I do not even know what kbin is

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

Simply merging the two feeds doesn't make sense. But there are, I'd say, more than one level of integration, all of which are useful.

  1. Single app that allows you to sign in to both platforms with two accounts. Both platforms are presented in separate views, but you only have one app that also manages all of the peripheral preferences like theme, notifications etc.
  2. Single app that partially fuses the two platforms without simply providing two completely different views.
  • EG ... all feeds of communities/magazines can be listed under "groups", all users under "people", and all notifications from both platforms (including "DMs") under one list/feed
  1. Some special aggregation service that you only need to create one account for but that provides you access to multiple platforms with proxy accounts. IF such a thing were to exist, there'd probably a whole range of possible hacks .
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I like this approach!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Kbin is a Lemmy clone that has a mastodon client built in. It uses slightly different terminology (e.g. magazines instead of communities) but is otherwise functionally the same.

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

So I've since gathered that this isn't true. As I understand, and I could be wrong, Kbin doesn't provide a feed of the people you follow in the same way mastodon etc do. Instead the microblog view is a view of the comments in all the magazines without being organised under posts. It's like the "comments" view we have here on lemmy but threaded (I asked if we could have the same here: https://lemmy.ml/post/1932250).

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

Instead the microblog view is a view of the comments in all the magazines without being organised under posts.

No, that's absolutely not the case. From the microblog feed, I'm able to find my own posts from Calckey and PixelFed (e.g. https://kbin.social/u/@[email protected]), neither of which have touched or in any way interacted with n a kbin magazine.

You can follow users on kbin, but AFAICT you don't have home or local timelines, only federated/global. Instead, these stream of posts that are not addressed to a Group actor can be mined for hashtags by magazines, and those posts with matching tags get shown in a magazine's Microblog tab. Any posts that are untagged, or which cannot be assigned to at least one magazine, get dumped into m/random's Microblog feed.

Threads are specifically addressed the Group Actors. Comments belong to whatever they replied to. Microblog posts neither address a Group Actor nor are in reply to a thread or thread comment, and so are fundamentally detached from the core threadiverse ecosystem.

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

Thanks for the clarification! Appreciate it.

And yea, I was aware of the m/random feed and it being basically a global feed. I obviously wasn't clear on what exactly goes in there.

But, as someone who doesn't find the global/federated feed useful/interesting (and from polls I've seen, this is the same for most people), I don't think the microblog view would hold any value for me or most people for that matter.

Is a proper microblog feed on the road map?

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

It kinda does. But the problem is the microblogs people post to the groups on kbin drown it out.

I followed elonjet on my instance. If I click on the main kbin page then microblog (NOT from a group, since it will filter only microblogs to the group) and scroll I will find the elonjet updates along with all the other stuff people probably mistakenly posted by clicking + and then add post instead of add thread (probably because reddit called them posts).

So it does work correctly. If you filter out all the microblogs that were probably posted by mistake.

Oh and you can get directly to only the specific content by clicking your name in top right, profile, followed and choosing the followed user. You'll see all their posts there.

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

Thanks!!

As mentioned by @[email protected] above, the microblog section, while it will contain posts by people you follow, seems to essentially be a global or federated feed of everything that goes through the instance ... so it's not just the microblogs posted to groups drowning things out then ... ?

How would you filter out all of the microblogs posted by mistake? If the microblog section is like a global feed, how could you filter out everything but those you follow?

I don't want to be too critical of kbin here, especially as it's young platform with a bright future, but it shouldn't be too hard to explain how to get a feed of the people you follow ... right? Unless it's just not possible? In which case, people should really stop saying that kbin is lemmy + mastodon. From the perspective of writing posts to both platforms, it seems to fit the bill nicely, especially with the nice hashtag->magazine feature. But for reading a feed, it appears to not have the mastodon side covered at all.

Is this on the roadmap (I would guess so)?

IMO, there is a tad too much "hype" or "overselling" happening on the fediverse. Excitement is good, obviously. But I've seen a bit too much factually incorrect statements about what is possible with a specific platform, which, IMO, only do harm by either leading someone to disappointment or feeling like a platform is too hard to use because they can't work out how to do something that isn't actually possible. I certainly felt that way about kbin and getting a feed of those I follow and dismissed it as having a bad UI, now I realise that I was under a false impression.

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

You could make a report here suggesting an enhancement.

But what comes into the feed is anything posted on kbin as a microblog (potentially by mistake) or, from mastadon where they tagged a community subscribed to.

It isn't normal threads to groups that end up there.

Just looking at the current feed on my instance (you can see yourself, you don't need to login https://kbin.life/microblog) the first item is from a mastadon user that tagged the [email protected] group. Hence why it shows up there since the instance takes content from there.

The next 2 items are clearly people on kbin.social that mistakenly (well maybe deliberately, but I suspect not) create a post, not a thread in the [email protected] group.

You can tell which is which, the mastadon users are deliberately using hashtags and tagging groups with @. The others are making a very reddit style post that is turning up in the wrong place because they chose post, not thread.

But I think it'd be a nice option to just show followed people and not groups. Maybe a three way toggle. People, Groups, All.

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

Thanks! It's an interesting point you make about the user mistakes. Names are annoyingly important huh!

I'm on kbin.social, and the microblog page there just now seems to show posts from mastodon accounts that aren't using hashtags or tagging a community: https://kbin.social/microblog

For example: https://kbin.social/m/random/p/792477/Did-Twitter-remove-the-buttons-to-open-a-web-page

Scrolling down and this seems to be quite common on kbin.social .... ?

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

OK then I can see what's happening and there needs to be filtering added (and not just by magazine as it allows now).

I think it's putting into random microblog posts by anyone that any user followed. In fact, you can confirm it easily by scrolling down on my one while not logged in. I mentioned I only followed elonjet. And sure enough there's some posts by elonjet a bit further down, but otherwise it's just mastadon users tagging groups or kbin users making a mistake.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn’t that the differentiating feature of Kbin? Ability to both interact with Lemmy. Immunities and mastodon microblogging?

I am new. I may be wrong.

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

That's correct. There's a great comment by @EnglishMobster that summarizes the advantage of using Kbin to interface with microblogging platforms like Mastodon: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/129425/Can-some-one-explain-how-the-microblog-feature-works#entry-comment-507634

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

The reason this doesn't work so well is that Lemmy communities are ActivityPub groups, which is not a feature the Mastodon has really implemented - right now you just follow the group as a user and it boosts all the posts to you.

However, Mastodon plans to do groups in their next major update, and this will most likely make the integration much nicer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

While it doesnt yet support Lemmy you might be interested in fedilab. Its goal is to combine all fediverse services into one app.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Quite interesting. I'm now curious on the other way around. Could we use our lemmy apps/instances to follow/post/reply to mastodon stuff?

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

Not yet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

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

Personally I'm still quite confused on how Lemmy and Mastodon interact...

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

Two different types of software - Lemmy is a link aggregator like reddit, Mastodon is a microblogging service like twitter.

But, underpinning each of them (and various other types of software too) is something called ActivityPub. This is a protocol - i.e. its a method of passing information from one place to another. Just like SMTP is a protocol for passing emails and FTP is a protocol for transferring files.

So just like GMail uses SMTP to send/receive email, so does Hotmail or Yahoo etc etc. And just as Lemmy uses ActivityPub, so does Mastodon.

What this means - in theory - is that content can travel between any piece of software that is underpinned by ActivityPub. And in fact, this already happens. Mastodon users see Lemmy communities (e.g. c/fediverse) as just another user. So they can follow Communities and Post to them. Lemmy can't do that at the moment because it is nowhere near as mature a product as Mastodon.

The other issue (as has already been mentioned) is that Lemmy and Mastodon (and PixelFed, PeerTube etc) all have different types of content. Lemmy content usually has a much greater word count per post for example. It's like posting a WordPress blog post to Twitter.

These issues will get resolved with time, the Fediverse itself is relatively new. Lemmy is very new.

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

Thank you and @[email protected] for the explanation. I understand that the underlying communication protocol is the same; what's not clear to me yet is how I can follow communities from Mastodon or post from there – but of course there are good tutorials out there, just haven't found the time to go through them yet.

What I don't get at the moment is how a Lemmy community would look like on Mastodon. Maybe like a hashtag-topic? I agree with others here that the context and way of interacting within a (Lemmy) community is quite different from those of Mastodon exchanges. So I suppose I would be quite confused seeing the two together. Or maybe not – I haven't checked this, so there's half a prejudice on my part there.

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

What I don’t get at the moment is how a Lemmy community would look like on Mastodon.

I speak under correction here but I believe if a Mastodon user follows a Lemmy Community, the titles of new posts to that Community show in their Mastodon timeline.

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

They both use fediverse. So it is theoretically possible to view one's content from another. However, it ends up being a UX nightmare.

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

kbin is what you're talking about. It combines Mastodon with Lemmy in its own software and I can interact with both. Additionally it's not maintained and run by tankies.

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

Do wefwef or memmy support kbin?

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