It's a familiar enough looking place, with some good discussions. But what's super cool - at least to me - is that "Lemmy" isn't just Lemmy. There are people here using websites running all sorts of engines. Mbin is a different reddit-like platform that cross-communicates with Lemmy. Friendica is a Facebook-like engine that can talk with Lemmy. NodeBB is a traditional forum. Mastodon, Misskey, and Akkoma are Twitter-like platforms that can show up here, too.
It's a mesh network, with each node having different strengths and weaknesses, different UIs and UXes, and different rules and goals.
It's both familiar, and also something totally different, both at the same time.
This sounds super interesting - I understand a lot of what you said, but maybe not all of it.
Any recommendations for learning about this cross-platform integration?
Is it simply something like cross-posting to a different site? I like how Lemmy seems a lot more “web 1.0-2.0”’ish, but I’m left wondering what I am still missing. Thanks!
If you follow a community (or a user, if you're using something that allows following user accounts, which Lemmy does not) on a remote website, that website will send the website you're using a copy of all future content they post, and your website will include it in your feeds (as well as in the sites's 'global' feed). It doesn't really matter what software those other sites are running, so long as they A) use ActivityPub, B) have federation turned on, and C) have not blacklisted the website you're using.
It's like following a Twitter user or a Reddit subreddit from Facebook. And it highlights that that's a thing they all could have done, if they all wanted to work together to make it happen.
I think this is what confuses me, like, how? If Lemmy is like reddit and Mastadon is like Twitter how do they talk to each other. Do you follow someone on Mastadon via lemmy and then their "tweets" just show up on your front page?
So, there are different types of... the jargon term is "actors", but you can think of them as, like, accounts. Each user has an 'actor' associated with it, and each 'actor' has an inbox. But there are also group actors, which are not individuals, but more like a system or bot account. Group actors just "boost" (reblog/re-shaere/etc.) content that is sent to them.
You can follow other actors, both on your own website, as well as on other sites. When you follow a remote account, your host site will request the remote site send all future content posted or "boosted" by that account to your host website, and then your host website will add it to your feed.
Different software allows different kinds of requests. Mastodon makes no distinction between user or group accounts, and let you follow all of them. Lemmy, though, uses group actors for its communities, and only allows users to follow groups. This means that Mastodon users can see Lemmy discussions, and contribute to them, but Lemmy users cannot follow Mastodon users or interact with their posts unless they've been boosted by a group actor.
Other software has other abilities. nodeBB lets group actors follow other group actors, which has the potential for mutual group synchronization. mbin has both a Reddit-like interface as well as a separate microblog feed, separating out group and user content. Hubzilla (and I think Friendica?) allows accounts to have multiple actors, letting you manage multiple 'personas' from a single login. And they all speak the same language, which means they can accept content from all the others.