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.

  • MattEnglish
    1•2 years ago

    Feel like a lot of answers are getting really technical here, which is not what you’re asking for.

    Basically each platform has many of the same concepts, being things like users, groups, likes, boosts, posts, replies, and so on. Then, each platform interacts with those things in a certain way.

    So for example, you could search my handle @matt@lemmy.world on Mastodon, then any sort of post I make on Lemmy will be shown on your feed as if I was posting on Mastodon. Comments are considered “replies”, so wouldn’t show up directly, but do show up on the profile page under replies.

    You can also follow users on other platforms on Mastodon, put their handle into search and you can follow them the same way, so a user posting something on Pixelfed will appear in your Mastodon feed, and a user posting something on PeerTube will appear as a Mastodon post in your feed.

    Other platforms are similar to Mastodon, such as Misskey and Pleroma, and they work as you’d expect as they’re another take on the microblog format. Just follow people and post.

    Lemmy has somewhat bad interaction with non-Lemmy platforms, only really working well with Kbin, and with limited interaction with Mastodon. However the concept is mostly the same: On Mastodon, users can mention the community (which is a group technically) and then Lemmy will pick up the post through the mention and post it to the group.

    So for example, you write something like:

    @Fediverse@lemmy.ml

    Hello world!

    This is a test post on Lemmy

    And it will show up as a post on Lemmy in the Fediverse community on lemmy.ml with the title Hello world!, with the rest being the post’s content. Can also put a link, but I’m not 100% on the syntax since I never really looked into it.

    As for posting on Mastodon from Lemmy - this is currently not possible, nor is following any Mastodon user, since right now Lemmy only follows groups.

    There’s a lot more platforms out there and they all interact with different ones in different ways, you just kind of have to experiment! The most important thing though is that you have users you can follow (on most platforms) and things you can post, which will display on all platforms where people are following you.