So I’ve been trying to get myself accustomed to this place and understand whats going on.
To my understanding: -There are Lemmy instances -Instances communicate with each other to create the “Lemmyverse” -There a larger version of this that encapsulates all (or a lot of) services that use ActivityPub called the “Fediverse”
My question is how or if would I interact with said other services from Lemmy? Is that possible? Could I say, see Mastodon or Peertube content from Lemmy? If I can, how? Do I sign up to those sevices with my existing Lemmy account? Can or will I soon be able to interact with everything through one account? Because that seems to me like it should be possible assuming everything and everyone is federated.
How is Lemmy interconnected with the Fediverse right now, and how might it become further connected in the future?
I’m new to it as well and I’ve been poking around for info recently, so take this with a grain of salt.
Fediverse = Lemmies + Mastodons + Pixfed + all the other things that use Activity pub. They can, more or less, all talk to each other. So you can, more or less, get stuff from Lemmy on Mastodon and vice versa. But for right now, it looks like that can be a bit of a hassle – or at least more of a hassle than we’re used to with centralized services like FB, IG, Twitter, etc. You generally have to look them up and get a specific link and search on your own instance and follow.
But the fact that they can do this at all, and that so many people are working on making it better, means it will probably become easier and easier over time. And the more you play around with them, the less of a hassle it becomes.
My takeaway, for the moment, is that it’s simpler to keep Mastodon and Lemmy as two separate things, but it’s not so hard to cross instances within each of them. And since I am still new to this, I’ve joined a few instances of each to get a feel for them. Signups for both are really simple. The main thing I look at to decide if I’d want to join is their local feeds – the things you could browse easily if you joined that instance. I feel like it gives you a sense of who’s there and what they’re posting and what the instance’s main interests are.
I’ve been using lemmy.world as a general instance and joined beehaw.org and mander.xyz for more focused instances with different approaches to moderation and federation. But following communities across instances is pretty easy to do once you try it out. So that means you could have just one single instance and still follow interesting people or communities across all the other instances out there.
I agree it’s better to use Lemmy and Mastodon separately. A tip: You can follow your Lemmy account from Mastodon and easily boost your own posts onto there, which might be a nice way to increase exposure of anything you post.
As an aside; Kbin allows you to boost posts. If you follow a Kbin user from Mastodon you’ll see all their boosts (and regular posts, and replies). So, if you follow your own Kbin account from your Mastodon account you’ll easily be able to transfer any posts you see to Mastodon - and then boost them to your Mastodon followers.
Nice! That’s good to know. I also just checked out a post from @[email protected] with some great info about viewing and following posts from entire instances here. That’s pretty mind-blowing.
Thanks for the mention @brainfreeze! I just wanted to add that having explored lemmy and mastodon, I really prefer kbin as a user. I’ve got access to both read and post in a searchable manner, and it nicely separates the twitter style content from Mastodon into the Microblog section. There’s also already a number of 3rd party greasemonkey scripts that enable things like collapsible comments and a floating subscription bar, link courtesy of @Boabab.