2y ago

So I did figure out that yes, #Mastodon can federate #Lemmy and #Kbin content. The problem

So I did figure out that yes, #Mastodon can federate #Lemmy and #Kbin content. The problem is that Mastodon doesn't know what to do with it, so it (the group) looks like a user that boosts all posts and comments.

I found myself browsing the "federated group" @selfhosted over on https://kbin.social, as I think Kbin has a nicer UX for it.

I didn't really want to create a separate account for group stuff, but that might be what we do in the short term. 🤔

43 comments

Oops! I didn't expect this to start a thread on @selfhosted (I posted this from Mastodon). Hello other Fediverse friends. 😅
- Lmao, the best part of this goof is that you accidentally demonstrated a way to sort of post with separate title/body text.
  It looks like a title may only be 90 characters on Lemmy, so I guess you could make the title text then pad out with spaces (or whatever) to then separate out into distinct body text.
  
  @ElectroVagrant I wonder if this will work too?
  (I'm using the "content warning" feature of Mastodon, and replying directly to a lemmy.world user)
  EDIT: Okay the content warning didn't work, but it appears that so long as I @ someone on the server that owns the group (it doesn't have to be the group),my messages will federate correctly. Also if you can read this, Mastodon's edit federation works too. 😋
I wrote this in another thread, so copy pasting it here:
I believe that the limitation is part of the Mastodon app, and not related to the Fediverse. There might be a character limit but I don’t think it’s as limited as Mastodon’s.
Btw, Mastodon isn’t really fit for this type of conversation. Mastodon aims to replace tweeter - microblogging interaction, where Lemmy aims to replace Reddit - thread interactions.
Each comment on Lemmy will be treated as microblog on mastodon which isn’t really practical.
- Except that that sounds like a Mastodon lack of features. Cuz Twitter had threads. As long as you were replying to someone each conversation was a sub thread and so on.
I think group is to be implemented in Mastodon soon™. Qoto's fork already did, and some other microblogging implementations like GNU Social and Frendica had supported such feature since before Mastodon (the software) even existed.
- Decades ago on status net one could just write an hashtag with an exclamation mark instead of a hash and it would go to anyone that followed it. It was kinda crazy but also so cool.
I tried my best to use mastodon as a platform to post to lemmy/kbin but ran into a major problem: nested comments get lost to the ether, and there's no way for you to reply to them using the same account.
Because of this, and basically this alone, I decided to forfeit mastodon all together and opt for a self hosted lemmy instance. I just got it set up and running this evening and so far, I'm not looking back.
Might set up another mastodon instance later, but that's if I start to miss it.
- I haven't really used kbin but I'm wondering if that could bridge the gap since it has features from both.
- @Eddie If you include the group name (@selfhosted) it seems to work, but this isn't really practical.
  
  Hm, that's very interesting. I wonder if the platforms will build upon each other with future updates or if they'll continue to remain "seperate" in terms of formatting and QoL. Very interested in the future of cross platform federation accounts.
@mike Interesting, I haven't really messed around too much with Mastodon. I've been primarily been using kbin and I've been happy with just this so far.
- @NumbersCanBeFun Okay that was unexpected. I managed to post a new topic and reply to Lemmy.world using my Mastodon client. That was supposed to be a "thinking out loud" toot. 😅
  I attached some images to my first reply, but they were ignored. I wonder if my server strips out markdown? 🤔
  Test
  
  @mike It's formatted well but whenever I click the link it 404's on me for kbin. I know the server is getting some big upgrades and is under a lot of strain right now, so that might be a factor to consider, at least as far as kbin is concerned.
- @NumbersCanBeFun @selfhosted Oh wow, I didn't realize this would actually cross post to Lemmy.world. 😅
Thanks for doing this experiment! I was really curious if it was technically possible (but not using Mastodon so wasn't able to test it myself), and now I know 😊
- @roosmaa @selfhosted Ha, I'm happy to have helped answer the question. 😆
  This was supposed to just be a toot to my feed sharing that I figured out how to follow groups from Mastodon. I was not expecting to stumble across how to post to groups using Mastodon too. 😅
I consider the video part of the fediverse, the lemmy/lotide/kbin part of the fediverse, and the mastodon/pleroma/so on part of the fediverse to be interoperable but their UIs are quite mutually exclusive, so I run sites for all 3.
@mike Same boat. I established an account over on Fosstodon during one of the Twitter exoduses. I like the UI more for kbin.social over Lemmy, so I think I'm here to stay. I tried out the federation between the two accounts, and figured out that mastodon really does twitter-like stuff really well. Kbin/Lemmy do reddit-like stuff really well. So I'm planning on just treating them like I treated Twitter and Reddit....as two separate services for different purposes with different UI's.
My only issue is that I chose a different name when I signed up on kbin.social/Lemmy to match other accounts I have (one of which I recently changed to be in line with the rest), and it's not what I have on Fosstodon, but I already moved once to a different instance (used to be on mastodon.social), I don't really want to change usernames on Fosstodon. Frustrating a bit for me, but I'll deal.
Oh wow, I didn't realize I actually cross posted to #Lemmy by @'ing the group. 😅
- @mike That is interesting, I was curious about whether it is possible to post to lemmy from mastodon... Seems like part of your message ended up becoming the title so I wonder if there is a way to format the message in a way that won't look out of place on lemmy
  
  @73ms @selfhosted @mike
  The problem is of course that microblogs don't have a title, so Lemmy just resorts to using the first words of the post. Kbin solves it differently, with microblogs being treated as entirely separate from the "threadiverse". They are not given a headline, and downvotes are disabled.
  If you want to make sure a microblog looks good in Lemmy I guess the best you can do is to use a descriptive first sentence, ideally followed by starting a new paragraph. As there's no title field in microblogs, there's really nothing else to do, and as kbin handles microblogs differently there will probably always be some weird headlines popping up in Lemmy unless something changes on the technical side.

43 comments