I noticed my feed on Lemmy was pretty dry today, even for Lemmy. Took me a while to realize lemmy.ml has been going up and down all morning, and isn’t federating new posts.
But, since this is all still federated, I can still create and read posts on other instances while I wait. Even this one! Any other service would just be unavailable completely right now.
I do miss the larger communities on lemmy.ml - asklemmy, memes, and I really wanted to watch the reddit fallout on /c/reddit. Maybe I’ll look around for some good replacements for those. Open to suggestions!
Can someone explain to me what is the link between Mastodon and Lemmy? From the Wikipedia chart, it looks like ActivityPub links them together in some fashion; I just don’t get how.
In theory, Lemmy and Mastodon are compatible with one another, as they both use ActivityPub.
In practice:
Mastodon users can only see Lemmy posts as Boosts (“retweets”), and from what I hear, it’s fairly annoying and not a good experience
Lemmy users can’t see anything on Mastodon at all, Lemmy doesn’t have a way to federate with Mastodon instances yet.
This is the first time Lemmy has seen this many users ever, so I’m confident both of these issues will be fixed sooner or later. When they are, you’ll be able to see Lemmy posts on Mastodon as if they were posts (“tweets”), and you’ll be able to see Mastodon posts on Lemmy as some kind of post (not sure if the format has been decided yet).
Just to clarify, Mastodon users can already make posts to Lemmy communities, just not the other way around yet.
Definitely agree it’s not a good experience yet though.
It’ll be great when fediverse will become interconnected open ecosystem
I’m really interested in the idea of these different kinds of websites being interoperable because of ActivityPub. Like the different websites are basically different frontends for people who prefer link aggregators or micro-blogs or other kinds of websites. It’s a really cool idea!
I would like to add to your picture yggdrasil and matrix based messengers, as this will help infrastructure to be more robust and expand
The only problem with federation is duplicate communities, and I don’t even see that as being necessarily a bad thing. I’ll subscribe to multiple communities for the same thing and if, over time, I end up getting annoyed with some of them I’ll just unsubscribe.
Yeah, I think it has a certain charm. However I fully agree, without it being addressed this will lead to issues and setbacks in the future trying to build communities. For now I’m subbing to all and trusting the process that creases will eventually iron themselves.
I think, kept this way, instances should be more clear what kind of ‘country’ they want to form. For example a group that has tech as the primary interest, should go about starting the instance as such, and setting ground rules for communities therein. Tech related, even if loosely, and differentiated from the masses. Or a better example would be, a European - English Instance could require a suffix like EU or UK like newsUK or photographyUK simply to attract the more locally relevant audiences.
A more involved solution could be to tag your community like Twitter into topics it wants to show up in feeds for (as well as tags that exclude it)… like ‘technews’ tagged in the ‘news’ and ‘technology’ but excluded from ‘politics’ and ‘finance’ and ‘onion’
Another one could be to allow communities to federate with one another. If a news community spots some large news audiences in other instances, the moderators for each community could federate with one another and create a supercommunity (like a multi on Reddit), allowing the super to operate on both instances but share hosting of something along those lines.
You could also have moderators agree to join forces by migrating one community over to the larger server and closing up shop. This may happen naturally with time.
All those users who were told “Please move from lemmy.ml to somewhere else. It’ll crash. Please spread out” are now seeing why :))
I saw a reddit post about alternatives and lemmy was what stuck out the most, and then there was another about how it works (not that indepth) and from there I got to lemmy.world and been here since yesterday
Federation was very hard for me to comprehend at the beginning, but it all clicked once I read a little of the documentation.
For me it clicked instantly after reading e-mail analogy.
I’m honestly surprised at how useable Lemmy is as a whole. Mastodon shit itself during the Twitter migration. Idk if it’s just a lower volume of users or what.
On one hand, yeah, federation is cool. On the other, I’ve already seen two @Technology communities on two different instances, and I can see this issue becoming even worse.
A good solution would be to have some mechanism of merging same-named communities of multiple instances. But, alas, nothing like that afaik
Although this issue might be more severe for Lemmy, I think it still occurs on Reddit, but it ends up working itself out. For instance, there’s also a “r/tech” and (at some point) there was a “r/technologynews” subreddit, which you could view as redundant and possibly confusing to new users. But r/tech seems to have focused on longer-form more in-depth discussion while r/technology is certainly the larger and more general of the two, so most users will probably just sub to the larger one and maybe others will decide they like the vibe of r/tech more. In the long term, I’m sure a similar thing will happen to communities with the same, or close to the same, name.
Yes, but the problem is that your analogy isn’t a 1-2-1 comparison. You are correct that at reddit we had r/tech, r/technology, r/technews, etc etc etc, but on lemmy, ALL OF THOSE can be named “Technology” with exactly the same spelling. So, when I’m trying to refer someone to a “specific” Technology, I also have to include the server. A conversation may go, “Hey WooChoo, you gotta check out the posts over on Lemmy. They have the best Technology content on the internet” Then you go to some rando “Technology” on a new lemmy server and you don’t see any posts. What are the chances that you come back to me and say, “Hey Debo, remember that referral you gave me 6 weeks ago when we were talking? I went there and there wasn’t any users.” "Oh, sorry WooChoo, I forgot that you have to go to “THIS SPECIFIC SERVER of Technology” and then you’re in a federation conversation when you were just trying to share a hot tip.
I think you’re totally right! That’s partially why I said it’s a bigger problem on Lemmy. Tools like browse.feddit.de will be pretty important; it’d be great if they were placed prominently somewhere.
I didn’t even know browse.feddit.de existed until you posted it!!! Hot tip right there. :)
