the fact that @lemmy bans you tells you everything you need to know about it as a platform. I didn't want to be accusatory when I thought my comments were being deleted but it seems that they were.
I would not know exactly in this case. Only that I once noticed somewhat indirectly and unofficailly that some folks on that instance see matters that way.
@lemmy I was just going to go on Lemmy and it says my account is banned until the 27th. I clicked on the email thing to see if maybe there was an email with some sort of reason and it said my account is being verified but then I checked my email and found nothing. Would you mind letting me know what or why or what?
when i follow a lemmy community on mastodon, the "account" of the community boosts both posts and replies - that is not how it is on lemmy itself, and the replies being boosted lead to a lot of out-of-context on my timeline. why is that so, and is it possible to change it so that it boosts only posts?
It is a common problem and probably the main pain point in trying to interact with lemmy communities from mastodon. You’re not alone here! The quickest advice if you want to engage with lemmy communities is to just create a lemmy account and use lemmy UIs/Apps.
Nonetheless, it would be nice if it weren’t a problem, as you ask! Unfortunately, as I understand things, the problem is entirely on the mastodon end of things, and mastodon is well known for both being somewhat brutalist, simple and stubborn in its ideas about what their platform should be, and, slow to change and develop new features (word is at the moment that development on any new features has actually come to a standstill).
So I wouldn’t get my hopes up for this problem to disappear any time soon, and generally, my sentiment is that the fediverse would be best served by spending energy on moving on from mastodon as the super dominant platform. Right now, mastodon comprises ~88% of monthly active users of the whole fediverse. Personally, I’d like to see that get below 50% and ideally around 20%, assuming mastodon doesn’t change too much.
The reasons, AFAIU, why mastodon doesn’t provide a good interface to lemmy:
Mastodon flattens all feeds into a single reverse-chronological feed. There’s no threading of replies (which is seriously fucked for major though niche social media platform in 2023) or any sort of filtering or sorting.
Mastodon, in line with above, has no concept of tiered content. There aren’t posts with comments attached. Everything is a post that can also be a reply to another post. As a result, everything just gets dumped into the feed like a giant stream of stuff. There’s no way, that I know of, to view only top-level posts (that is, posts that aren’t replies). Along with the lack of threading, mastodon is basically antithetical to any structuring of online social media content, which is striking given that we have basic structuring in every other form of online content from email to old school message boards and forums to facebook and twitter and youtube and any normal webpage.
Mastodon has no concept of groups, where a lemmy community is a group. These manifest on mastodon as users/bots that boost. But that’s not what a group is really (or at least how lemmy/kbin and probably facebook/friendica see them). They’re spaces in which multiple people (ie a “group”) can post in regards to a specific topic or parent post. So already, apart from the above points, you’re fighting uphill when it comes to mastodon and an alternative more structured format of social media.
Mastodon is extremely limited when it comes to the formatting of posts. It’s basically all plain text with some link formatting and nothing else. No markdown support. And, most importantly, little respect for the formatting of other platforms, where, for example, a lemmy post basically doesn’t make sense when viewed on mastodon: no links are provided (when they’re part of the lemmy post), same goes for images AFAIU, and, only the title is provided while the body is cut out and you’re left with a link to the original page of lemmy post. Basically, it’s useless and disrespectful to the platform. As I understand, lemmy is essentially complying with activitypub (?) in the way the information is packaged, it’s mastodon that isn’t doing the work. And why would they when their view of social media is so brutalist.
Mastodon has no facility for backfilling, which is fetching all of the relevant content when prompted by a user. Instead mastodon relies on everything being on the local instance, which is filled up by all the users followed by users of the the local instance. If that doesn’t provide some content, then you never see it. Communities/groups work differently. The idea is that you’re supposed to see exactly the same replies/comments no matter which instance you’re on. So on mastodon, the idea of receiving only top-level posts in your feed, and then, when you’re interested, viewing all of the comments, without those comments always filling your feed, doesn’t make sense. As that would be backfilling and it’s not something mastodon does.
All up, I can’t see any of these problems, let alone all of them get better any time soon. And, IMO, this is to the detriment of mastodon and, as it’s the dominant platform, the fediverse at large. Communities/groups are a fantastic way to connect with people. Apparently mastodon will be implementing groups of some sort, which might help. But then there’d still be the issues of whether mastodon interoperates well with other platforms. Given all of the above, I wouldn’t have high hopes, though I’m happy to be proven wrong.
More broadly, I think a successful fusion of microblogs, normal blogs and communities into a single interface/platform is one of the next steps the fediverse can make in its growth as a major alternative to big-social-media. It’d be novel, a killer feature arguably and it’d bring people together more effectively while also giving people plenty of options for how and where they want to connect.
I think the time is ripe for mastodon alternatives, like lemmy and kbin, to get more attention and investment from the fediverse at large.
@lemmy hi. I have tried to install many android apps for Lemmy on an old android phone. And was disappointed they either don't support older versions or just can't work connect (flutter based apps).
I thought open source and libre movement cared about the environment and reducing e-waste. Instead it's bigcorp who makes sure their apps run on potato phones even kaios feature phone.
Anyways a fork of inifity for Lemmy would be awesome
I think @lemmy@lemmyworld might not get the support Mastodon got because Twitter is more seriously used by some people and needed an urgent alternative whereas Reddit is still primarily used for entertainment
@BrikoX given that all big subreddits are protesting instead of switching. Lemmy has not threatened Reddit even remotely close as Mastodon did forcing Twitter to block Mastodon links.
I 100% agree with you, Lemmy only needs to be a competitor, not a replacement.
Sad to see almost none of the devs, from
Apollor (ChristianSelig), RIF (u/talklittle), Infinity (u/Hostilenemy),
Boost (rmayayo), BaconReader, to Relay (u/DBrady), etc. are not considering Lemmy at all.
I know these were hobbies but by atleast developing it for some time just to make transition for your audience to Lemmy easier would have gone a long way!
@lemmy@LemmyDev Lemmy will remain a niche platform if not enough people switch to it
Not to sound rude, but did you do any research before naming all of these? Boost developer is developing a Lemmy app, you can find it on the Play store already. Sync developer is also developing a Lemmy app.
As for Boost, that was announced a few days AFTER my post. Yes I didnt edit it because there was the word limit and I also like to believe my post played some part in making the devs consider ;)
There is a reason why I used the word "ALMOST". All my posts are heavily researched :D
I think mastodon webfinger search is broken by the newest lemmy release
I can no longer look up lemmy posts by their url from mastodon. I am checking and it seems instances that haven't updated still work but the ones on v18 don't work
@BitOneZero I don't know if that issue is the same cause I can search for the @name version of a lemmy profile but not the url version of the same thing
Can you post to multiple Lemmy communities at once from Mastodon?
I recently made a post from here and tagged three communities in it, on three different Lemmy instances, but it only made it to the first one. Is this just how it is suppose to work? And regardless how does this mechanism work? Does it get posted to the first one tagged and then the others deny it? Or was it a synchronicity that my post just didn't federated to the second two?
Wow lemmyverse.net just crossed 800 running instances of Lemmy that it's tracking!
Go check out some some communities! https://lemmyverse.net and follow a few from whatever software you are using. If you are searching from Mastodon replace the ! with an @ in the !groupname when you search for it or search using the full htttps://instance.domain/c/communuty in your home server search bar