Hello, some people have told me that it is possible to see lemmy posts from mastodon. To me it makes a lot of sense to have a single app for whole fediverse. However, mastodon is not doing a good job at this.
Each time I look at my mastodon home feed, it is spammed with completely random posts from lemmy which do not even show up in the organised view wefwef/memmy provide. Is there any way how to take care of this?
For lemmy I have found wefwef and memmy to be actually quite good. Interface is simple and easy to use, posts look organised. On mastodon it just feels far worse, especially with lemmy connected.
Are there any alternatives to the official mastodon app that would allow better integration with lemmy? To me it seems logical to have a single app for both platforms as they use the same principle.
Two different types of software - Lemmy is a link aggregator like reddit, Mastodon is a microblogging service like twitter.
But, underpinning each of them (and various other types of software too) is something called ActivityPub. This is a protocol - i.e. its a method of passing information from one place to another. Just like SMTP is a protocol for passing emails and FTP is a protocol for transferring files.
So just like GMail uses SMTP to send/receive email, so does Hotmail or Yahoo etc etc. And just as Lemmy uses ActivityPub, so does Mastodon.
What this means - in theory - is that content can travel between any piece of software that is underpinned by ActivityPub. And in fact, this already happens. Mastodon users see Lemmy communities (e.g. c/fediverse) as just another user. So they can follow Communities and Post to them. Lemmy can’t do that at the moment because it is nowhere near as mature a product as Mastodon.
The other issue (as has already been mentioned) is that Lemmy and Mastodon (and PixelFed, PeerTube etc) all have different types of content. Lemmy content usually has a much greater word count per post for example. It’s like posting a WordPress blog post to Twitter.
These issues will get resolved with time, the Fediverse itself is relatively new. Lemmy is very new.
Thank you and @[email protected] for the explanation. I understand that the underlying communication protocol is the same; what’s not clear to me yet is how I can follow communities from Mastodon or post from there – but of course there are good tutorials out there, just haven’t found the time to go through them yet.
What I don’t get at the moment is how a Lemmy community would look like on Mastodon. Maybe like a hashtag-topic? I agree with others here that the context and way of interacting within a (Lemmy) community is quite different from those of Mastodon exchanges. So I suppose I would be quite confused seeing the two together. Or maybe not – I haven’t checked this, so there’s half a prejudice on my part there.
I speak under correction here but I believe if a Mastodon user follows a Lemmy Community, the titles of new posts to that Community show in their Mastodon timeline.