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?
Lemmy doesn’t currently work with Mastodon, and I don’t think there are any plans to change that. So the two platforms, while both federated, aren’t truly compatible.
Kbin (kbin.social) is a sort of in-between service. You can follow both Lemmy communities and mastodon accounts. It has two different halves, with a feed for Lemmy and a Microblog feed for Mastodon posts.
This confuses me as to what the long term appeal of a lemmy or mastodon account is. Would general users be better off joining kBin, while users who want to only interact with mastodon, or only interact with lemmy, and not with each other, would join either lemmy or mastodon?
It sounds like KBin has the best support for acting as an alternative frontend for lemmy and mastodon. If someone on lemmy links to a mastodon post, or vice versa, you have to leave the instance to go view and interact with the post, but on kBin that could not neccesarily be the case.
It just seems like having some sort of universal frontend would be the most flexible and not have any downsides.
The downside is ease of use. Not everyone wants to set up a mastodon feed or a Lemmy feed. Lots of users only want one specific type of post.
For instance, I hate the Twitter-style microblog. I choose to use Lemmy because I specifically want to exclude Mastodon posts from my feed.
There’s also the issue with app development. Apps for Lemmy have undergone a lot of development in the past few weeks. Apps for kbin are basically non-existent. This is an issue that could be solved with time and the right developer(s) but as it currently stands a mobile user will be better off using kbin in their browser. So if someone is looking for a more seamless transition from Reddit, the natural move is to Lemmy.
That makes sense! I guess for me, personally, if I want to be able to access and interact with multiple types of media I should create an account with a platform that supports multiple other platforms like kbin does.
I wonder if there will be a platform that is dedicated to supporting as many of the other large fediverse platforms as possible.
Thanks for the explanation!