Testing out comment federation, please don’t mind me 🙈

Pinging @_elena@mastodon.social @elena@friendica.opensocial.space and @elenarossini@pixelfed.social (because, why not) 🙈

one more interoperability test, this time from Lemmy.world to a self-hosted new Friendica instance. Hello @jerry@my-place.social - let me know if you get this! 👋

I’ll add this info here.

https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/flipboard-fediverse-following/

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 @fediverse@lemmy.ml) 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.

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 (@elena@lemmy.world) and community (@fediverse@lemmy.world) 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.

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 @elena@lemmy.world 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.

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.