What the fediverse needs is....CIRCLES! (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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So, I was thinking that I joined Lemmy.World because Lemmy had more users than MBin. But today I was looking at https://mbin.cocopoops.com/ and started seeing MY posts. I knew Mbin could have different instances. I knew Lemmy could have different instances. And I knew they all federated together.

But I didn't know Mbin could federate with Lemmy. But I'm sure Lemmy/Mbin probably won't federate with Pixelfed, or Peertube.

Mbin, piefed, and Lemmy are essentially reddit replacements. So they should be in a circle. It doesn't matter how many users Mbin has, or piefed has, or Lemmy has. It matters how many the full circle of federated reddit replacements have. Because thats the true circle of users that you can interact with.

So what we need is a website that you enter an instance, and it tells you how big your circle would be on that platform, and a list of federated, and defederated instances with it.

So Lemmy.World would have a pretty high circle. While hexbear would have only itself, if I understand right.

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[-] Chozo@fedia.io 14 points 3 months ago

But I'm sure Lemmy/Mbin probably won't federate with Pixelfed, or Peertube.

Technically, they do! It's not fully-integrated yet so the process is a bit hackish, but because the ActivityPub protocol works mostly the same on the backend, content from any of these platforms can appear on the others without much issue.

The biggest issue just has to do with the way you actually interact with each platform may not translate well on another compatible platform. For example, Pixelfed typically nests replies to comments only one layer deep, whereas Lemmy or Mbin will nest many layers deep. The actual nesting still works just fine when you view Pixelfed comments on Lemmy, and if you join in the conversation and reply in the middle of the thread, your post will nest properly for you and will show inline as normal for Pixelfed users. So in some instances, you may need to know a bit about what platform you're posting to, on top of the platform you're posting from.

There's other quirks like Mastodon replies typically being preceded with @ing the user they're replying to, which isn't a thing on the Lemmy side of things. It doesn't really change the way posting works, and you can choose to not do it and things will still work fine.