Why bother when we have Mastadon?
As I understand it, Mastodon doesn’t federate like Lemmy/K-Mbin does (and Sublinks & Piefed too!), where in order to follow someone you need to be on the same instance? Or something? Anyway Mastodon needs some work before it could be a viable replacement.
Edit: I did not phrase this well at all. Oh well, it led to an interesting discussion so I’ll leave it here for posterity, but it’s incorrect. I think the only correct part of the above is that if you try to leave a Mastodon instance, then like a Lemmy one, you can’t really take your account with you (only your settings, but people who followed you before will have to now follow you again in the new location, it does not automatically transfer). So it “federates” but it’s not “freely transferable” as people were over-selling it to be.
there are 2 sides to the AP-connected fediverse… microblogging (tweets/mastodon) and the threadiverse (federated forums/lemmy). mastodon is 100% microblog. lemmy is 100% threadiverse.
mbin is both.
i can easily follow/be followed by mastodon, universodeon, etc as well as fully participate with lemmy.
Thank you for the explanation!:-)
But can someone follow you from a different Mastodon instance than the one you are currently on? Or was that something that changed in the last year? Maybe I misunderstood or it wasn’t explained to me well, but I definitely get that people don’t want to switch instances bc they will lose all their old followers, but is that the main impediment to people using Mastodon - they just don’t want to switch to using it? If so, it’s enough, bc as we have seen, these large entities like Twitter are a lot more fragile than people used to believe.
It is actually easy to participate in Lemmy from Mastodon. Federated community are represented as user. When someone write on the community, they appears as the author on Mastodon while the community boost the post. This way a Mastodon user can follow acommunity. By mentioning the name of community in a post that is not an answer to another post, their write post on the Lemmy community. The next post in the Mastodon thread will be treated by Lemmy as comment.
The problem is more in sharing comments. After one or two level of comment it is becoming very buggy. For the rest, it works very well.
I thought Blue Sky wasn’t based on ActivityPub at all. Isn’t a different implementation better than no implementation?
Bluesky does their own thing: https://atproto.com/
Bluesky uses “AT protocol”, not ActivityPub. Ironically the former is trying to federate as well, but still it’s a different protocol altogether (so it would federate within its own network, as in people could start up their own Bluesky instance). Despite that, some people tried building a bridge between ActivityPub and AT, but there was enormous pushback, driven in part by ideological differences between more serious Mastodon users and the more casual X/Twitter style user (picture a Reddit mod, now halve their IQ, and I’m just joking bc I’ve never had a Twitter account so I don’t truly know what that filth is like to have to wallow in:-). Anyway, MBin is able to connect Mastodon to Lemmy bc they both use the ActivityPub protocol, but AT is a different protocol.
A lot of things allow you to export your settings, but nothing that I’ve heard of allows you to import your posts and such - and therefore truly migrate - your account from one place to another. Therefore the whole federated concept has been oversold - as in, “if you don’t like a place you can leave it and go somewhere else”, the same as anything else in the entire history of space and time (divorce, immigration, quitting your job, etc.). But if you do, then you lose everything - all of your follower base, which for like an author is impactful to their actual career. Hence why so many are so reluctant to leave X, despite the Musk having taken over (and the smell permeating the place now, to where most of their followers are gone as well).
It’s the same reason why “everyone still uses Windows” (I don’t): herd mentality, and also, like using Querty (that one I do), holding onto the past bc of not wanting to pay the price to have to switch.
but people who followed you before will have to now follow you again in the new location, it does not automatically transfer
It’s possible to leave a redirect information on the old profile. Normally all your followers are informed about this and automatically follow the new account.
Anyway: this means that you depend on your old profile and server to work at that moment. If the server completely vanishes or if you’re banned by the admin for whatever reason you can’t set that redirect information.
By the way it’s worthwhile to consider that in the case of Bluesky at least right now the whole portability of profiles is depending on some kind of centralized Meta server in the background that manages the identities. Bluesky claims that this won’t be necessary in the future, but right now it does afaik still work like this.
Incorrect. It’s just a different kind of platform. There’s no really simple way to make a twitter-like site and a forum site mesh fluidly, but Mastodon users can see Lemmy posts and comments and like and reply to them, and I believe even post. Lemmy users can interact when Mastodon users come into Lemmy but are limited in discovering other Mastodon content.
