As of right now, you can follow either Lemmy accounts directly or follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon relatively easily if you know what you are searching for. This is really cool because you can read (and participate to !) discussions without having tu use a Lemmy-specific app or account. The wonders of the fediverse !

But the interaction through mastodon has a few issues, notably:

  1. Communities repost comments too, making the community feed unreadable
  2. Media in Lemmy posts are links, which make them quite cumbersome to watch (which is also the case in Lemmy itself ? I’m curious as to why) (minor problem)
  3. To my knowledge, you can’t post to a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but that’s to be expected I guess. (minor problem)

The discussions on Lemmy often are more interesting than over on mastodon but I prefer mastodon’s format so I am way more active over there. It would be way more pleasant to have everything in the same feed but because of 1. this isn’t possible at the moment.

So the question is: does anybody know if Lemmy can or will fix any of these issues, especially n°1 ? Or is this something to be fixed on Mastodon’s side ?

sry for English 🙃

  • @randomaccount43543English
    17•4 months ago

    Also I would like to be able to follow a Mastodon user from Lemmy

    • @[email protected]English
      15•4 months ago

      The lead devs have acknowledged that it would be good (they did an AMA not long ago). But they feel it’d be a lot of work and so not a priority right now.

      Personally, I think lemmy would have a lot to provide in reimagining a user’s personal blogging feed as something more like a personal community they manage for themselves.

      • @CandelestineEnglish
        6•4 months ago

        …I really like the sound of that idea.

        • @[email protected]English
          7•4 months ago

          Me too! A lemmy user could even have multiple personal blogs if they wanted, each separately follow-able, with cross posting when wanted. Then you could follow either their posts to general communities, and/or any of their personal blogs.

          Once multi communities come, lemmy then becomes an interesting blogging platform that should also interop with mastodon well.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•4 months ago

      This is out of scope for Lemmy, there are already dozens of Fediverse projects which provide this functionality so it makes no sense to reimplement it in Lemmy as well. And if you want both follow both communities and users in the same platform, thats exactly what Kbin and Mbin provide.

      • TroyEnglish
        1•4 months ago

        Out of scope, yes. But it sure would be nice from a more abstract perspective. Right now content flows in one direction. Lemmy->Mastadon, but not vice versa.

        This could be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on whether you are a content creator or content consumer. If you’re creating content, a post to Lemmy will have a wider reach (huzzah!). But if you’re a lazy lurker and want to check fewer streams, then you sign up to Mastadon and get both (huzzah!).

        Anecdote from history, for comparison.

        Back in the late 80s, early 90s, when OS/2 and Windows were competing for marketshare, this was a choice that IBM made – to make a Windows compatibility layer on OS/2. Technically, it was a masterpiece, and increased the number of programs available to OS/2 users. Why choose Windows when you can choose OS/2 and you can select from the best apps from both ecosystems! Except it backfired within a few years – developers stopped developing for OS/2 entirely, instead targeting the Windows API because they could reach both platforms with it.

        I suspect that Mastadon being able to draw content from Lemmy, and not vice versa, is a similar thing here. But I’m unsure if it will help or harm Lemmy.