Lemmy interoperability with Mastodon (feddit.ch)

submitted 10 months ago by uhrbaan@feddit.ch to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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As of right now, you can follow either Lemmy accounts directly or follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon relatively easily if you know what you are searching for. This is really cool because you can read (and participate to !) discussions without having tu use a Lemmy-specific app or account. The wonders of the fediverse !

But the interaction through mastodon has a few issues, notably:

Communities repost comments too, making the community feed unreadable
Media in Lemmy posts are links, which make them quite cumbersome to watch (which is also the case in Lemmy itself ? I'm curious as to why) (minor problem)
To my knowledge, you can't post to a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but that's to be expected I guess. (minor problem)

The discussions on Lemmy often are more interesting than over on mastodon but I prefer mastodon's format so I am way more active over there. It would be way more pleasant to have everything in the same feed but because of 1. this isn't possible at the moment.

So the question is: does anybody know if Lemmy can or will fix any of these issues, especially n°1 ? Or is this something to be fixed on Mastodon's side ?

sry for English 🙃

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[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

As far as I can tell, it’s not lemmy’s problem, it’s mastodon’s.

Lemmy can’t control how mastodon presents the information that lemmy shares.

And mastodon does a bad job of formatting lemmy content because mastodon is actually a fairly minimalist (I’d say brutalist) platform. No text formatting. No threads (well now they have minimal threading). Only one feed type (equivalent to “new” on lemmy). And communities and groups aren’t processed as groups, but just like users that boost/re-tweet everything in them, which is not what groups actually are at all.

This is the fundamental problem with the promise of the fediverse … platform inter operation is not guaranteed at all as there’s no clear path to reaching common ground on how to format every other platform’s content. The protocol has nothing (or very little) to say about that. Then, once you have a bunch of platforms, you’ve got a lot of work to do, as each platform needs to workout how to render every other platform’s formatting. For N platforms, that’s basically N^2^ formatting projects.

In reality, federation is mostly an inter-platform system. For the moment at least. It makes sense that at some point one’s “window” onto the fediverse is capable of understanding any format you want and will render everything as it was intended. Instead, at the moment, the fediverse is running like it’s still 2010 and the cloud is still new and cool and having users on servers is the only way to do things so that we’re all still stuck on servers/instances and bound to their admins and applications. IMO, it’s hardly living up to the promise of the internet, and hardly doing to social media what the internet did to computing.

With the internet, I opened my browser and visited any webpage I wanted to see it as it was intended by its author no matter who wrote it.

With the fediverse, I visit one webpage and see any post I want, so long as it doesn’t come from a defederated server (which can be a problem sometimes), but only in the one format that my one webpage/instance has decided on, no matter how it’s supposed to look and indeed does look if I were to view it on another webpage/instance. When the browser is over 30 years old and PCs around 50 … this feels unimaginative to me.

[-] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It seriously doesn't do Markdown formatting?! That's a no for me, Dawg

That's like 2/1 the fun for me

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 7 points 10 months ago

I think it’s the only platform that doesn’t do any kind of formatting.

[+] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

[deleted]

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 4 points 10 months ago

Some counterpoints ...

Regarding groups in Masto, the problem is more than the lack of an interface level "spec" in the protocol ... mastodon doesn't support groups ... you can't create or post to them natively within mastodon ... they've just created the most basic interface to external groups. So before we get to whether mastodon's interpretation of how to interface with groups is good ... we need mastodon to actually implement an interface. Which is on their roadmap.
I'm not sure I see your point about "timelines". Communities are just flexible use-empowered timelines, while the mastodon timelines, according to every poll I've seen on them, are mostly not used and not appreciated while of course being inflexible.
I feel like you're underselling how standardised the web is, especially relative to the amount of complexity a page can have compared to what we've got on mastodon, which is basically plain text. How long ago had the web standardised enough for the basic markdown rendering that most (ie non-mastodon) platforms provide?
Comparing the fediverse to email feels like your supporting my arguments. That's an old craggly system that we've had plenty of time to learn from.

Otherwise, yes mastodon does render markdown now. It's relatively new and it's to forget about it as you can't write with the same markdown (which is a rather telling choice I think about mastodon's minimalist ethos). But as you say, it's rather limited (I've never tested its limtations myself) ... and that's just a markdown spec. Anything remotely fancy like MFM coming from a *key platform/fork just doesn't work.

And yea, I'm with you on lemmy/masto being limited. Thing is, I'd bet that this isn't a coincidence. I feel like you could argue that ActivityPub is on the vague and ambitious side of things and leaves a lot to the platform/software devs. And so to make something work with that the first generation of platforms had to be rather focused in order to make a working and usable platform. A bit of a "worse is better" scenario. kbin/mbin definitely show promise in broadening the horizons of what the fediverse, as a UI/UX can be. I'm not sure why you advocate joining a misskey fork as they don't have any federated groups interface (they're basically very fancy microblogging platforms).

Where I think this should head is more modularity, where the AcitivityPub server you use is far more generic, and basically handles for you anything the protocol can handle, while your interface into the "data stream" is much more flexible/modular, being provided by composable apps that allow you to view and write posts/content in any format if you want. For example, in this kind of system, lemmy wouldn't be a monolithic platform. Instead it'd be an app for writing and viewing ActivityPub content in the "lemmy" format, that you can load into your generic browser interface/environment, and use whenever you're viewing content others have written using the same app.

From the little I understand, Bonfire (now in beta) has similar-ish ideas.