Hi everyone!

I’m new here and I wonder if you have any advice/testimonials to share regarding Fediverse interoperability.

I’m working on a post about it for my blog series The Future is Federated. I’d like to do a show & tell, demonstrating what interoperability looks like between #Lemmy and #Friendica, #Mastodon + a federated blog to start with.

There’s a superb post by @[email protected] about Lemmy and Friendica communities: https://www.informapirata.it/2024/01/02/mastodon-tips-how-to-use-friendica-groups-forums-and-lemmy-communities/ and I wonder if you have ever tried further integrations.

I know this sounds crazy, but does #Phanpy work with Lemmy? I’m asking because I use it with not only #Mastodon but also #Pixelfed and Friendica.

Anyway, any testimonials and tips would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

@[email protected]

  • aasatru@kbin.earth
    18·
    28 days ago

    Hi, and welcome!

    Lemmy does not, as of now, interoperate very well with Fediverse services such as Mastodon and Pixelfed. Sure, you can follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon, but it’s not a pleasant experience. The group just boosts everything that is ever posted to it.

    Likewise, Lemmy does not work with Phanphy - it has its own API, and separate apps. It’s too different from Pixelfed/Mastodon for it to make sense to share an API.

    If you search for @[email protected] at mastodon.social you will, however, be able to see your user from there; you can view this post, and if you have an account you can comment on it and contribute to the discussion like anyone else. You can also boost the post or comments to it, making it possible for content from Lemmy to reach far and wide. We sometimes do get comments from Mastodon users, so it clear that this happens every now and then, but mostly it’s kept separate.

    Mastodon users can also post to Lemmy by tagging a community (like they would tag an a.gup.pe group), but it’s not very intuitive.

    We commonly refer to Lemmy as part of the Threadiverse - a subset of the Fediverse which revolves around threaded discussions around shared content (Reddit like). The main platforms are Lemmy, Mbin (which is what I’m currently posting from), and PieFed.

    Mbin and PieFed go further in the direction of interoperability than Lemmy does. Mbin supports Mastodon-like microblogging; if you check out the search for the hashtag Lemmy, you’ll see not only this post, but also microblogs from Mastodon and all kinds of content. Limited, of course, by what is federated with that instance (Kbin.earth doesn’t have too many users).

    In Piefed, users can follow Mastodon groups made with a.gup.pe, such as the knitting group. Often Mastodon users start their posts by tagging each other, so it doesn’t look completely native, but it can be neat. You can also follow PeerTube channels directly in Piefed.

    In short, it’s quite complicated - there are different platforms, and they all solve interoperability differently and prioritize it to different degrees. There’s always the possibility that Mastodon users will stop by and say hello, but how easy it is made for them to do so varies quite a lot.

    • informapirata :privacypride:@mastodon.uno
      12·
      28 days ago

      @aasatru @_elena @elena Unfortunately, Mastodon staff has no interest in decently managing Activitypub groups. They are probably working on an implementation that is incompatible with any other platform and could take away visibility from Mastodon…

      PS: Lemmy is the only platform that has had an exploit that overshadows Mastodon’s success

      • aasatru@kbin.earth
        4·
        28 days ago

        “probably” is a nice word here. I have seen no indication that Mastodon plans to make their groups difficult to work with for other platforms. There is, however, many interests to take into account to ensure a good user experience, and not one solution is guaranteed to work well for everyone. What works in the Threadiverse might very well be terrible in Mastodon. They follow very different network dynamics.

      • kopper [they/them]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        24 days ago

        Mastodon’s WIP implementation uses the conventions of Smithereen semi-standardized as FEP-400e. It’s not something “incompatible with any other platform” (it’s not commonly implemented, but it’s not bespoke for no reason either). FEP-1b12 used by Lemmy also has it’s own quirks (why are we Announceing activities?) and the specific implementation used by Lemmy will likely not interoperate far without breaking changes that will upset one or the other party, mainly the fact that users and communities can use the same webfinger handle.

        Either every single other software needs to have specific quirks for Lemmy in order to handle this as most (reasonably) assume the username@domain combo will be globally unique, or Lemmy instances need to go on an account or community deletion spree to make this non-unique. You can easily DoS a user or community’s federation outside the threadiverse bubble by setting up one of the other with the same username on the same instance.

        PS: Lemmy is the only platform that has had an exploit that overshadows Mastodon’s success

        what? I’d like to remind you Lemmy is the third most largest open AP server software. After Mastodon, and Misskey. (by a not insignificant margin, with Misskey having 8.6% of all known users by FediDB, and Lemmy having 3.8%) Just because they’re Japanese doesn’t make them any less a part of the network, and they do have their own innovations (MFM, and emoji reactions are just the ones that federate. They also had quotes before many others but I think they’re not the first on that one).

      • wakest@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        23 days ago

        Oh cool I didn’t know this. Excited to see more peertube and threadiverse convergence

  • Ludrol@szmer.infoEnglish
    9·
    28 days ago

    I have only observed Lemmy->Mastodon and Mastodon->Lemmy

    If I follow a community, in mastodon it will show as boosts and will show Title + link to the original post with all the comments also as boosts. It has some probability of working. Not always. I couldn’t get hashtags to work.

    If someone mentions some lemmy community it will get federated into that community but only into first mentioned community. The first line of a microblog will be set as a title. When users write hashtags and mentions first, it will be unreadable. Not all replies will get federated back and forth.

    P.S. I have seen kbin [R.I.P] (Long Live Mbin) posts on lemmy and it worked good

  • distant plant@microblog.lakora.us
    7·
    28 days ago

    ActivityPub addressing is really somewhat complex and pretty much any server is going to abstract it with things like at-mentions, sometimes making different assumptions. When I reply to lemmy posts from my microblog.pub server, I sometimes need to make sure to include both the user (@[email protected]) and community (@[email protected]) if they happen to be on different domains. Otherwise my server’s addressing won’t send it to the right place. And I doubt other lemmy instances will see this post unless I tag them too.

  • 🇦🇺𝕄𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕕𝕔𝕣𝕠𝕔𝕕𝕚𝕝𝕖@lemm.eeEnglish
    61·
    28 days ago

    Its utter chaos some things federate some dont some federate in one direction but not the other some just mess with formatting. Someone really needs to come in and fix the whole mess. If i where to fix it id start with that flask implementation of lemmy then add whatever additional routes are required to make it simultaneously a mastodon server. The dream would be a single account that works across all federated services simultaneously federating the same post with the same comments across all front ends. Never going to happen tho sadly.

  • nasi_goreng@lemmy.zipEnglish
    52·
    28 days ago

    One common problem for fediverse is that most of them are Western-oriented, hard to find people with similar interest and common topics.

    Lemmy so far is replicating Reddit, which is tend to one-size-fit-all community. Gaming community? c/gaming is de-facto. Linux community? c/Linux is de-facto. And so on. Sure there are other server, but the one with most active community wins.

    I usually use Facebook Groups with hundreds of thousands of people. It’s nice to see groups of really small niche, like “local fried chicken seller,” “temple research South East Asia,” or “Singapore-only comic collector”, etc.

    There are plenty groups with similar topic, but entirely different culture. For example general gaming group:

    1. Gaming group which predominantly SEA people where mobile gaming is common.
    2. Gaming group with mainly Western people where mobile gaming is considered lesser form of gaming.
    3. Gaming group with audience where anime-manga-tokusatsu and other Japanese pop culture are mainstream. (Taiwanese, Indonesian, Korean, etc)

    Another example, healthy food groups.

    1. Healthy food groups with people from area where vegan food is common without labeling (e.g. India, Indonesia, Myanmar, East Timor).
    2. Healhy food groups with predominantly Westerner that try to replace all food to vegan food.
    3. Healhy food groups that revolves around local food, which its recipe are only suitable for certain region.

    All these communities might be same, but the entire vibe are different. One might more welcoming, other are full or rough jokes, some are okay with multilanguge post (not English only community).

    Unless fediverse is able to replicate this, I don’t think it will reach full mainstream, especailly for people in Africa, Middle East, or Asia.

    Edit: I also want to see Misskey Channel interoperability, as it has the closest vibe so far with Facebook Groups.

  • N3M@reddthat.comEnglish
    1·
    27 days ago

    Cool

    I tested/wrote about it recently, you’re welcome to copy my metaphorical homework if you want

    Friendica Side

    (I’m getting an Nginx error trying to load Nerdica, hopefully it’ll be back up soon)

    Lemmy Side

    Cross Compatibility portion of blog post

    The long in the short of it is that Lemmy can communicate with Mastodon & Friends, though since Activity Pub servers handle everything and microblogging platforms have no clue what Lemmy is doing there’s a bit of jank.

    You can post to a community by "@"ing it, although it can only be a text based submission. You can follow a community by following it’s name (say @[email protected]) and you’ll get submissions in the form of boosts/reposts. You can also grab a link to a post or reply and search for that on a microblogging server to reply to or like.

    My test went pretty well, although the post I made was slightly wonky (title and “@” appeared in the post text). I also didn’t see all the Lemmy replies make it back to my home server. If nomadic identities make their way to activity pub most of the jank could be resolved.

    As for a testimonial about compatibility something that sticks out is cross compatibility between Activity Pub, Nostr, and AT (BlueSky). I’m usually on Nostr, but I follow Activity Pub and AT accounts; and thanks to a copying of a json file you can search out the same username on Activity Pub or Nostr and find my Nostr account.

    • elena@piefed.social
      2·
      24 days ago

      It’s so cool to see your Friendica post in Lemmy! And I’m Elena the OP - I just signed up for an account on PieFed to compare/contrast it with Lemmy. And found my original post on here :)