this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Wait did I miss something big? Does Lemmy now federate with Mastodon somehow? How does that work?
Always has. Anything using ActivittPub can interoperate
I was under the impression that it theoretically could but wasn’t set up in a way that made this possible. But perhaps I was mistaken.
How do I access Mastodon content using my account here then?
Threads hasn't had federation enabled until now, but you've always been able to interact with Mastodon... sort of. The Lemmy UI doesn't really have a good way of finding Mastodon posts that don't tag a Lemmy community or of following Mastodon users, but if they do tag a community the Mastodon post will show up as a Lemmy post in that community.
I see. So functionally it doesn’t really work, at least in this direction.
You've had some well-meaning but ultimately not quite accurate answers in this thread so just to clarify:
You can follow, post to and interact with Lemmy communities from Mastodon, because they're treated the same way as a "group" on Mastodon in general.
You can NOT follow and interact with Mastodon users from Lemmy, because Mastodon accounts are individual "users" and Lemmy doesn't have the concept of following and interacting with users, only with communities. If Lemmy ever does add a feature to let us follow other users, then in theory following Mastodon users will also become possible.
You can't use mastodon from Lemmy, but you can from some threadiverse software like Kbin.
@LibertyLizard @technology It always has. They both speak ActivityPub.
The UX can be awkward though. As an example, I had to add the community tag to this comment manually, as it won't federate to lemmy.world otherwise. That's because Mastodon doesn't push replies to every server with users participating in a thread, which I think is a design flaw.
To post to Lemmy from Mastodon, just tag a community. You can load any of the fediverse links shown in the default Lemmy web UI in a Mastodon search box and reply to them. You can also follow a community and receive every subsequent post and comment as a boost (this is a bad UX and I don't recommend it), as well as follow Lemmy users, which you can't do in Lemmy itself. You cannot vote on Lemmy posts/comments from Mastodon.
I find tagging an appropriate Lemmy community from my Mastodon posts to be a good experience. You'll see a few of those from my @zaktakespictures account in @birding, and from @zakreviews in @flashlight.
I'm pretty sure Lemmy won't make new toplevel posts out of this in those communities since it's a reply, but I'm going to check just to be sure.
Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: !birding@lemmy.world, !flashlight@lemmy.world
As far as I know it's always been this way. At least since I joined during the whole reddit fiasco
How do you access Mastodon content in Lemmy?
It doesn't work so well in that direction. Lemmy doesn't have a concept of content that isn't posted to a community. If a Mastodon post tags a Lemmy community, it's available as a normal Lemmy post, but otherwise it doesn't exist.
FWIW I think this is intentional and a feature, not a bug. By spreading content to communities, you can delegate moderation responsibility much easier.
Content not posted to any community would need something akin to a site-wide moderator or an admin to moderate, and such a moderator wouldn't be as effective. They'd cover a wider array of very different content. Community moderators work better because they can define rules that are only confined to their comm and they know better how to moderate their own community and they also care more about their own community so are more motivated to keep it well-moderated in the fashion they want.
I didn't fully understand what I was talking about when I replied, and for that I apologize. Now that I know a little bit more, this is basically how it works (I think):
We cannot see posts made directly on Mastodon. However, they can see posts made on Lemmy and even comment on them. We are able to see those comments as normal and without doing anything on our end, but again, that's only as long as they're made under Lemmy posts