Help me understand this Fediverse thing
Help me understand this Fediverse thing
I apologize if there's posts on this already. I'm still new here, and it's very confusing.
I've read through the wikipedia entry, blogs, stack overflow posts, lemmy threads, etc... however in all of them, I feel like everyone glosses over how one goes about subscribing or even viewing content from other "packages". For example, I have an account on lemmy.world, and am using the lemmy mobile app. I'd like to view / subscribe / participate in content from Misskey. Is this possible?
Everything I've read suggests it is, given that both lemmy and misskey leverage the same protocol, though I can't figure out how that works.
Generally if you search for the full URL or handle of a profile or community your server should be able to find it. For example to find a user like mark ruffalo I just searched for @MarkRuffalo@mastodon.social on my lemmy instance. After a few tries it did find him but not his posts. I've only reliably gotten this searching to work through the main lemmy ui so your mileage may vary depending on the app you use. Misskey should work similarly I believe but I don't follow or know of anyone on there so not sure
Upvoted for actually attempting to answer the question. Very well done.
I believe it just finds the user and not the post because the previous posts aren’t synced. So if you are the first user on your instance (eg lemmy.world) to look at that user, only the new posts that this user posts after you have subscribed are synced to the instance.
I got similar results. I can see his profile, but not his posts. Thanks for replying! This definitely helps.
Should this work for Funkwhale? That's what I'm interested in.
That'd be nice. I think this is what confused me - I made an account here, and expected to be able to use this account to interact with other packages like Funkwhale. However, it seems this is not the case. Each package requires you to create an account on their platform if you want to interact with their content within their app.
"could not find the user" on Liftoff app
Hi @SleepingTower@lemmy.world,
a Mod Note: Please phrase your title as a Question ( Its our Rule 1 ) please change it in the next hour or we are forced to take down this post.
Thank you.
Sorry! Fixed.
Thank you :)
Well, the "how" is technically simple. You paste the URL to the search box and you hit subscribe. You can do that right now with:
- Lemmy communities
- Kbin communities
- PeerTube channels
- Mayyyyybe a.gup.pe / chirp.social groups???? idk how well those would work
Lemmy itself only let you subscribe to ActivityPub Group actors though, so it's quite restrictive in that regard. kbin adds user follows and microblogging into the mix, but you can't do those through Lemmy yet (or perhaps ever).
However, the real "problem" is presentation. While you can, say, follow a Lemmy group from Mastodon. Mastodon is not intended for groups so it kinda breaks and ends up spamming your home timeline with all the posts and comments. Other implementations such as Akkoma or Misskey or Calckey (pending rename) might end up interacting better (because Mastodon will try to convert everything it gets into Notes in a "lossy" fashion).
While the protocol does allow you the freedom to interact between services, you will not get the best experience if you're not on a "similar enough" service. Although that does not stop you from following a PixelFed account from Misskey, or a Mastodon user accidentally finding their way into the Lemmy comments section. (You can tell because they'll be the only comments that end up tagging people when replying)
Full disclosure I can be completely wrong, but this is my understanding.
I don't believe it is possible today to connect your Lemmy to Misskey. I may be wrong, but Lemmy at the moment supports kbin and lemmy. For example, Mastodon can read Lemmy, but Lemmy cannot read Mastodon. This is just a limitation of the way the app is programmed, even though the ActivityPub backend can communicate.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they interpret the endpoints differently so unless a mastodon post is directly targeted at a community or something, lemmy just drops it. That's why I still run a dedicated mastodon and lemmy instance. Kbin promises best of both worlds but doesn't seem mature enough for my tastes.
It isnt posting it directly to the others instance api. Rather the Servers "Bot" requests the others API for updates and "scrapes" it like so
I can see how the incompatibility can happen, despite the common protocols, each package serves a different purpose. For example, what should be shown when you subscribe to a video hosting service through a Lemmy instance? An aggregated list of thumbnails? A list of videos? What is a video hosting service to a link aggregator.
Despite having a common protocol, it does seem impossible to have one app handling everything.
Thank you for your reply.
There is one app I know of that is for generic ActivityPub activity, https://docs.microblog.pub/
But as you said, in the more complex UIs like Lemmy, Mastodon, PeerTube, it would be a challenge to make the different forms of content fit the same structures. Micropub isn't exactly nice to look at, but it is basic enough to be able to serve the different types of content... kinda
For example, what should be shown when you subscribe to a video hosting service through a Lemmy instance? An aggregated list of thumbnails? A list of videos? What is a video hosting service to a link aggregator.
While I agree with the general premise, this is actually something a link aggregator would handle well. Translating, say, a YouTube video to a Reddit or Lemmy post is just title to title, video as the link, description as the text, replies as comments. Despite being shown very differently and used for different purposes, they're about as similar on the backend as any two formats. Converting Tweets to Reddit posts and vice-versa is more difficult.
Reddit and Lemmy are both social networks. They post display content in posts, which can be links, media, or text.
Reddit is a single, self-contained service using its own hardware and software.
Lemmy is software that can be used by anyone to create their own self-contained service, using their own hardware. Essentially, their own Reddit.
Besides this "roll your own" functionality, Lemmy is designed to be federated. That is, if I setup a Lemmy server that my friends create accounts on, create communities on (subreddits), and create content on, and you do the same for your friends, you and I can choose to "federate" so that our two servers see each other as if we were just one server. Your communities are visible to my user accounts, and vice versa. Posts created on your server are visible on mine.
Multiply this by dozens of Lemmy servers (or instances) that all choose to federate with one another and you have the Fediverse. It looks like one big Reddit server, with communities created and accessible across these different Lemmy instances. There's pros and cons to having a social network federated across several different owners, but the good news is if one of those owners decided to do something like that bothers the greater Lemmy community (start a Lemmy instance dedicated to Donald Trump), other Lemmy instance owners (such as you and me) can say we're going to defederate so that your server, communities, and posts created by your crazy ass userbase will not show up to users on our servers.
It seems complicated, but it's really not. It's like one of those scrambled images in the mall that if you stare at it long enough, you go "Oh. OH. That's awesome." Then you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to convince others of the big picture and they tell you to get lost. Or something like that.
Ppl have already provided really good information.
I wanted to add that generally a lot of things work in theory rn for Lemmy and other fediverse entities, but a lot of them are still riddled with bugs and stuff, so your experience might not line up with what is theoretically possible.
I'd assume in January a lot of the apps are already broadly usable for the most part with some minor bugs still sticking around. So things will definitely improve greatly over the next while. But until then things might not always look like you'd expect them to.
It's been compared to email. There are many different clients and ways to send and receive email, and they are all compatible with the core text. It's not perfect, some places still don't see others, but the concept is that everyone can share a base communication and connect to each other using different methods and styles.
That's not helpful at all.