Hello everyone.
I am relatively new here on Lemmy, and the Fediverse, and there is still a lot I am trying to learn.
I think I understand the general theory of how the different instances and communities work here on Lemmy, but I’m struggling to understand how the different federated software interacts with each other.
For example, I understand that it is possible to follow a community, commenting on its posts, or a user subscribed to Lemmy even from Mastodon. Similarly, it is possible to follow an author on Write.as, again through Mastodon.
What I wanted to understand is what software in the Fediverse interacts with each other, how, and how do you get them to interact.
I hope someone can help me better understand how things work, as I find the idea of the Fediverse absolutely fascinating, a real breath of fresh air in the modern Internet landscape.

  • @PriorProjectEnglish
    1•2 years ago

    I tried to summarize a bit of the user experience of interacting across the family of ActivityPub apps here: https://lemmy.world/comment/37121

    Quoting for convenience:

    From Mastodon…

    • A Lemmy community looks like a mastodon user. You can post to the community by at-mentioning the user. The first line of the toot becomes the post name, the rest of the toot becomes the post body. If you ever see posts with the title @communityname, you can bet that’s a mastodon user who didn’t format their toot in a way that maximizes readability on Lemmy.
    • Existing posts from Lemmy look like toot threads in Mastodon, with each comment as a toot. You can reply to a comment by replying to the toot. Again, if you see a comment beginning with the username being replied to, it’s a decent bet that reply is from a mastodon user.

    From kbin, Lemmy communities look like magazines, I think… and behave pretty much like communities.

    Other apps may interoperate differently, or may just feel a bit broken depending on the specifics of how it uses ActivityPub compared to Lemmy.

    In short, you kind of just have to try stuff and see what works. Cross-app interactions might be very useful and convenient or they might be very confusing and broken.