I am new to the Fediverse. I vaguely understand how Lemmy instances broadcast content to each other, but I was surprised to find Lemmy communities on kbin. How does that work?
And it also seems that mastodon can also be "syndicated" to these other communities, and vice versa? Is that true?
Are there limitations to any of this?
Apologies if this is not the perfect place to ask this question. I'm a lost old man. :-)
My favorite thing was when I grasped what "microblog" was. It follows hashtags related to a community. So I want to see what is going on in #Boston, but it's too much to have all the random stuff in my feed. But I can check the m/Boston magazine and scroll around what's up on the microblog to catch up when I feel like it.
And I found out how to push my posts out to Mastodon.
I know it's still a work in progress, but I think it's kind of slick, really.
I have no idea if this is "officially" how to do it. But I followed my own kbin account with my Mastodon account. So anything I put here that is a "thread" category (links, photos, etc) get propagated to my Mastodon feed. So from there I could re-toot them. I haven't so far, but it would be easy.
But that also means if someone follows my kbin from Mastodon, they'll see those too. I think?
All fediverse software (lemmy, kin, mastodon, etc) implements their own version of ActivityPub in slightly different ways. There are cases where the overlap is enough to cross over (lemmy communities and kbin magazines), and some where it doesn't work/is wonky (lemmy users can't follow mastodon users).
I don't know so much about Lemmy. In kbin, you just search for the user address and it will show in the results.
That doesn't seem to be the case for Lemmy though and I don't know if Lemmy has any way to make search work this way, but you can always manually build the user profile URL in Lemmy the way I did: <lemmy_instance>/u/<user address>
It's times like this I wish ChatGPT was more up to date on all this lingo. Because I'm still scratching my brain about how things all interconnect. I'm sensing ActivityPub is like phpBB forum code back in the day with a modern twist.
Either way, I'm glad to find an alternative to reddit and see the system "fediverse?" start to grow.
I myself have blocked reddit at the router level to ensure I don't accidentally visit the site and give them any traffic - I haven't visited the site since the blackout started.
Lemmy, kbin, and Mastodon all speak the same underlying protocol -- ActivityPub. I've found that the best way to think of it is to compare it to email. If I send you an email from my gmail account to your outlook account, it just works (well, mostly, email is a bit of a mess lol) even though the two email clients look vastly different from each other. ActivityPub (and federated protocols in general) are like email, but for twitter/reddit.
There are some different message types (it wouldn't make sense to present twitter-like content in the context of a threaded forum like Reddit), and not all instance types support all the different message types. I'm using kbin (via kbin.social) and I can see Mastodon content, but I'm not sure if Lemmy has that ability.
Not sure if that was helpful, and I hope that others come and fact check me, but that's my understanding of it.
Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. I didn't know they spoke the same underlying protocol.
For fun and experimentation, I'm answering you from my Kbin account. I feel like a kid in a candy store playing with this new technology. Maybe Reddit's suicide-by-greed is not entirely a bad thing.
I agree. I'm sad at the loss of my 12 year account over there and all the information it had built up. I'm sad to lose my niche hobby communities (for now). Even with that, I'm really hopeful that federated social media will eventually take off. Now we just need to make sure that major corporate interests don't dig their gross claws into it (Meta is apparently making plans to do so).
I feel like Meta going into the fediverse shows that they can see the tide rising on decentralized social media. My main concern with the Meta instance is more about whether or not they'll support account migration.
To me, the killer feature of the fediverse is the account migration. (it's coming eventually to kbin)
Sure it's nice (actually awesome) to see content from so many diverse communities... But the killer app is being able to move to a new server when you need to and get your followers to automatically follow you at the new location. This prevents enshittification to a large degree, because there's no lock-in network effects.
I've seen some cool discussions about decentralized identity and how it can be handled, but that's probably still a future goal, not likely in the immediate future
I'm way over my head at this point though
Still, it's fun so far even while it's still under such heavy development, so I'm just vibing
I heard about it but I don't understand how. When I look for a community of lemmy on mastodon, it appears empty ( no post ), but I can see that there are people following it.
What is really cool is that you can mix and match features, like if you follow a Mastodon user on Misskey and vice versa, the Mastodon user can see the Misskey users full 5000 character post, even though Mastodon is limited to 500 chars.
Yes, that is one of the features of being federated. Kbin and Lemmy and Mastadon (and others) can all federate with each other, so posts and comments are all shared. It doesn't really matter if you're on Kbin or Lemmy, you can see the same communities/magazines and comments for the most part, and interact regardless of which one you are currently logged in to.
Well, my understanding is that email is federated, and SMS text messages are federated, but it isn't easy to email a phone number, or send a text to someone's email. So I'm surprised that Kbin and Lemmy can talk to each other.
But I see someone else answered that Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon all speak the same underlying protocol, ActivityPub. Now it's starting to make sense.
Glad it's starting to make sense. And notice here that instead of replying on Lemmy, from my lemmy.ca account I am replying from Kbin, on my kbin.social account.
Mildly off topic, and showing my age a bit on this one but it 100% is easy, as long as the telco in question supports it.
I used to be with Koodo up here in Canada (albeit this was years ago) and the ability to send/receive emails via your phone number was trivial. Literally could email 5555555555[AT]msg.koodomobile.com and it would be received, and when you reply the other side gets the email reply.
Whether companies still do this on the other hand, is the question (that no one asked lol).
I think text to email is pretty universally supported. I work with clients who text my email address, and as far as I can recall I've always received the messages and been able to reply.
I remember seeing that as well in the US, but I think it was just too early in the internet phase and too odd to catch on. Then once smartphones became a thing it was pointless.
Yeah, however I think this doesn't mean email and sms share the same protocol like kbin and Lemmy. I am guessing that the service provider (koodo in this case) is serving as a relay, basically people email koodo, and koodo forward that email to your phone.
I think your example of email and SMS messages is a good analogy... Just because they can talk to each other doesn't mean the presentation is always correct. For example I'm on Lemmy, and I have seen replies by people on Mastodon in these threads. However the Mastodon replies have a different formatting so you will see the leading @user1@user2 types stuff on those replies which really stands out when you're reading from a threaded interface. And I can't imagine how you would navigate through a lemmy/kbin post while using Mastodon.
So yes, you could get to everything from a single user account, but I find it better to still have different accounts on Lemmy and Mastodon just to make it easier to view things in the intended presentation method. Maybe some day there will be flags embedded in each post so that one interface knows how to properly format what you are reading, we're just not there yet.
It's easier if you imagine that kbin and Lemmy are simply the underlying email servers in this analogy and the email itself (content) is what's happening across the ActivityPub protocol.
Add comment