this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025

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Fediverse-wide Interoperability (piefed.social)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by suff@piefed.social to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social

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TL;DR I want Mastodon hashtags treated like communities.

Given the following homomorphism (morphism, analogy) between microblogs like Mastodon and the forumverse:

nr	microblog	forumverse
010	subscribe to hashtags	subscribe to communities
020	include particular hashtags in their posts	(cross-)post in particular communities
025	include particular hashtags in their posts	include particular hashtags in their posts
030	list posts of a hashtag	view a community
040	comment a post	comment a post
050	star a post	upvote a post
060	boost into TL	approve "into" community

I wish to interact with microbloggers as a piefed user. Piefed could render microblog posts that contain a hashtag as a community post within a "community" named by this particular hashtag. Also, microblog accounts could be viewed like a regular user in piefed.

Pros: Lemmy posts and communities are visible and subscriptable in Mastodon already. Piefed should complete this connectivity.

Cons: Re-interpreting microblog posts as forum entries could lead to some misunderstandings which again lead to defederation. But I cannot think of any.

Edits: Added 060, 025, TL;DR
Edit: There appears to be a Mastodon integration being planned.

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[–] julian@activitypub.space 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Hey suff@piefed.social let me share what I've been working on here at ActivityPub.Space

We're running NodeBB, which is a federated forum software that interacts with the threadiverse/forumverse natively, but also interacts with microblogs.

Anything coming from microblogs has no community attached, so we throw it all into a single "uncategorized" bucket.

This forum I am posting from is about ActivityPub, so I set up an auto-categorization rule so that posts using #ActivityPub get slotted into general — sounds good, right? Except that tag has a fairly low SNR. Every day I have to remove 4 or 5 posts that are at most tangential to ActivityPub at all.

I ran into similar issues with #climbing for a rock climbing forum. People use #climbing when they climb rocks... but also trees, fences, buildings, etc...

So it can work, it just needs some ongoing curation. Essentially what I am trying to say is... hashtags are fine, but its usage is nowhere near consistent enough to use in a global context like you are saying.

[–] suff@piefed.social 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Such flawed community picking while posting is one advantage of using microblogging. You can post regardless of having found the correct category or forum. Good point.. maybe.

On the other hand, maybe you should rename your community from "climbing" to "rockclimbing"?

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 3 points 6 days ago

I personally don't think it makes sense. They are fundamentally different, in one you subscribe to a user in the other one to a community. If it was a centralized platform then it might work with the mapping, but how will my instance find all the mastodon instances which posted a hashtag?

There are ways but they have so much overhead that I don't think it's worth it. Why not use mastodon for it?

[–] suff@piefed.social 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Due to noise ratio and code overhead, I'm ready to accept the least compromise: A small, filtering Mastodon client integrated in the mod tools UI where mods can easily import toots into the community.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you want to do this, Mbin can be a temporary solution, they support both format already

[–] suff@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks but I don't think I want a microblogging-UI within piefed but a translation into communities.

[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's how mbin does it, by tying tags to communities

[–] suff@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Just checked on fedia.io . It's not what I meant.

[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

From your post...

I wish to interact with microbloggers as a piefed user. Piefed could render microblog posts that contain a hashtag as a community post within a “community” named by this particular hashtag

That is literally how mbin does it!

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

@suff@piefed.social , have you tried looking at a specific community?

https://fedia.io/m/photography has the two views: microblogs and threads

[–] suff@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It's not two views on the same content. They keep microblogs and threads separated.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago

I think blaze was a bit confused at what you were saying but I got it as its kinda how I would like it as well. Basically mastadon in your feed. Like you could have a setting to do it at the user level. Honestly I would sorta like the logins in the fediverse to be able to be used in other fediverse instances. That would make a lot of things easier. Like I have 3 hubert manne accounts. one kbin, one on an mbin instance, and this piefed one. If I want to look at mastadon or loops I have to make a new account. Would love to click on links and have it just accept hubertmanne@piefed.social as a user. This would also make it where it is no longer necessary to fix links so they come up in an instance and decrease how much caching a particular instance needs to do.

[–] suff@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Do I miss something?

Communities are called "Magazines" on mbin. Magazines contain posts from the threadiverse (lemmy, etc.), not microblogger posts.
"Microblog" in the header menu links to a TL of microblog posts, not posts from the threadiverse.
From the comment section below threadiverse posts, you can upvote, reply and boost (a threadiverse comment to your microblogging TL), that's okay but why distinguish them in the first place?
You can passively view (and rank) the microblog TL filtered by tag. That feels redundant.

I want hashtags treated like communities.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I want hashtags treated like communities.

I see you mentioned on another comment that "boost" would be "approved", but that then implies that mods of the communities have to approve every single post using that hashtag?

[–] suff@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It would be an acceptable variant or configuration for very busy/misused hashtags. I think if many users can join the mod team, it would work well.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you look at https://fedia.io/m/photography/microblog , there are several posts per hour. That's not going to be doable to have mods approve all of those posts.

[–] suff@piefed.social 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Mods should be able to switch from opt-out (manually remove Mastodon posts from the hashtag-community) to opt-in (manually "boost" Mastodon posts into the hashtag-community). That switch could also flip like a fuse when a threshold is reached, with an admin-configured max_toots_per_day.

The flooded mod tool could help itself with filters by min_boosts, min_stars, links, media and max_age, etc.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

See this other comment about signal to noise ratio: https://piefed.social/post/1289879#comment_8099521

[–] suff@piefed.social 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Thanks. I still think we have a lack of content problem, rather than a lack of mods problem. The community downvotes context-misfits, mods remove meaningless stuff, filters hide threads, .... If we don't have the mod tools to tackle microblogs, we will need them anyway when piefed gets more popular.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Counterpoint: there are very limited resources, and a whole bunch of very basic and foundational things that do not work even within the Threadiverse (e.g. links that don't go to where they were aimed at, bc of the new way that comments load and then the direct link to a specific comment does not continue forward anymore past that; also searching, extra stuff in the API for 3rd party apps, etc.), as PieFed is so new. And those take on increasing importance now that lemm.ee has shut down and so many communities migrated over. People are waiting patiently for those fixes.

Therefore, while expanding to go beyond the Threadiverse into increasingly more niche use cases is desirable, the opportunity cost of slowing down the aforementioned fixes may outweigh them.

We can have it all, but not all at once, and not for free, with the current low level of funding support.

[–] suff@piefed.social 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I don't require it ASAP. But including this feature in present/early considerations could be important. Approving this request could lead to a greater dev community aswell.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 5 points 1 week ago

I'm not in a position to make suggestions, but I think requesting something and prioritization are two different things. So I think it's fine? I mean we have a bunch of feature requests open in the issue tracker shooting for big things...

[–] misk@piefed.social 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I don’t think this can work. A threadiverse community is contained by its instance and rules. A hashtag pulls everything from every instance so it’ll get unwieldy fast.

From the threadiverse point of view it would make a bit more sense to be able to follow specific microblog accounts as a way to get that content here. Microblogs (or at least Mastodon) are doing their own equivalent of that already because they can interface with threadiverse communities natively (they’re presented as groups that boost every new post & comment).

[–] suff@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

You could moderate piefed hashtag-communities.

nr	microblog	forumverse
060	boost	approve

[–] artyom@piefed.social 6 points 1 week ago

I do really wish there was a single platform that could interact in all the same ways as all the other platforms, with a single account. That'd be really nice.