Is better/seemless integration with Mastodon (and perhaps more) possible?

Ken Oh@lemm.ee to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 76 points –

Here's the thing. I'm a mod for a small-time community for a niche interest, !castles@lemm.ee I'm also on Mastodon, and was before my Reddit exodus. I follow #castles as well as a few other related topics on Matsodon, so I get quality toots, such as this: https://mastodon.scot/@McNige/110926238926867959, that I wish I could just crosspost over to my community. Currently, I have to repackage the toot, which isn't a huge problem, but currently I just drop them a note on Mastodon that their content has been posted elsewhere on the Fediverse. What would be nice is if people who comment on the Lemmy post also get fed into OP's toot. More sharing, more connection, more activity.

On the flip side, I've subscribed to @castles@lemm.ee on my Mastodon instance and, while it's good to be able to follow posts in feed form, it looks like ass: Lemmy post crossposted to Mastodon I realize I should try this with Pixelfed, but I haven't made that leap yet.

I don't know, am I thinking crazy here? I'd think we'd want everything in the Fediverse soup interoperable in a more seemless way. Is this a feature request or am I missing some way to do this better?

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The ActivityPub protocol makes it possible, but most apps only make use of the pieces of ActivityPub that suit them. For example, in Lemmy they lean heavily on the Group actor type as the basis for Communities, which Mastodon doesn't use at all. Peertube creates content using the Video activity type, while Mastodon only creates content in the form of a Note activity. Lemmy produces a lot of Link activities, which get rendered into a Note when viewed in Mastodon. And so on.

It's all a work in progress and I'm confident integration will get better over time. The framework is there.

Kbin has limited support for Mastodon posts but it's UI is still very much focused on the reddit-style functionality.

OK, thanks for the info. I'm glad people have the same thoughts. I hope your confidence pays off, for all of our sakes'.

I 100% agree with this. I don't really know the solution or even understand all the federation details of why they don't interoperate better, but it's definitely irritating to me that as far as I know, I can't:

  • Be on Lemmy and follow Mastodon people
  • Be on Mastodon and follow a Lemmy community and start to see posts to that community in my feed.

It's, like, so close to just being a single global software-agnostic communication place that anyone can rock with. But it's not. If anyone knows any solution I can use that can do some facsimile of both of those things please let me know (someone suggested Friendica as a solution but I haven't really looked into it in detail yet).

(Edit: Be on Mastodon and follow a Lemmy community and start to see posts in a way that's not ridiculous. Just have the community show up as an Actor, posts come from the user that posted them and the community Actor "retoots" them or whatever. No I don't know the internal details of why that way is hard to do or doesn't make sense, that's just how I want it to be.)

Yes, so close is exactly what I'm thinking too. Let's hope it gets there soon, before reddit's next big fuck-up to push everyone away (birdsite is doing a pretty good keeping up with fucking up, so less worries there).

Be on Mastodon and follow a Lemmy community and start to see posts in a way that’s not ridiculous.

I don't think it's that ridiculous? I mean I see the post title and user its from, with the link to the post. I wouldn't expect Mastodon to show a huge post in the middle of my feed of all the little toots, so idk what more I could ask for

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Die4Ever@programming.dev/110939335701439601

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Die4Ever@programming.dev/110939335701439601/reblogs

edit: incognito seems to cause those links to automatically redirect? which is maybe a good feature actually?

So, if I try to follow /c/technology@lemmy.world from my Mastodon account, then when I pop open my feed what shows at the top is this:

I don't want /c/technology to "boost" individual posts (edit: comments) from that sub such that they show up with no context in my feed. If what happened was that individual posts from the sub showed in my feed, and comments on the post showed up as replies under that post, that would be swell. IDK the technical details of the issue, or if there's anything I can do on my end to make this work better, but in my limited experimentation it looks like I just can't follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon without ruining my feed with these individual context-less comments.

Yes I do see communities boosting the comments too, they are marked as replies properly if I click on them. You're right though there's no way for Mastodon to follow a community without your feed getting filled with comments instead of just posts.

But I think the community needs to boost the comments in order for them to federate properly, so idk if there's a nice way that this could be solved.

It's totally not crazy thinking. :) I think the main problem is that while Mastodon and Lemmy implement the server to server part of ActivityPub, they don't implement the client to server part of the standard, and instead build their own REST API and client. This is why, while you can subscribe to actors from an other application, it looks bad : it's supposed to be consumed in their own client, or something that tries to emulate it (that, and the fact that they each implement their own extensions to ActivityPub, it doesn't help).

In a perfect world, ActivityPub based applications would implement the client to server part or the standard too, so that we have a multitude of third party clients that can consume data from any ActivityPub based application without looking broken. I certainly hope we go in this direction in the future, because interoperability looks half-baked, as it is right now, and the fediverse would be just more awesome with such upgrade.

Nah that's not it. It's just AP is extremely broad and Mastodon only cares about a hyper-specialized subset of it. AFAIK even with things like writefreely (which serves Page objects as opposed to Note objects which are what Mastodon uses for microblog posts) it first "converts" them to extremely long Notes and then handles federation that way.

From what I know other implementations such as the *omas or Friendica are a bit more lax and generally have wider compatibility with non-microblogging AP.

At least I'm not crazy. Glad you agree.

Kbin combines both, and does a good job segregating the different types of content. Lemmy reddit style posts are collected under the Threads category, and Mastodon Toots (tweet style) are collected under the Microblog category. The software is new, so there are bugs, but it provides a wider experience than either platform on its own. If you're looking for a smaller instance running on kbin software, I also recommend https://kglitch.social.

This guy loves kglitch too…🤔
https://kglitch.social/u/Trolljegeren

Well how about that. Looks like he's got your scent. Sweet dreams, and remember to wear your sunscreen.

I can smell this comment

Victory?

U ok bud?

Just living rent free in your head, lil man. Go ahead and have your nap now. You must be tired after that big tantrum of downvote spam, and you gotta start early tomorrow if you're gonna keep up.

You tagged me in this thread… but you’re living “rent free in my head”?? I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with you personally outside of a weird DM you sent me a month ago.

Seriously man are you ok?

You decided to spam downvote multiple posts before you were banned from our forum. Then you continued to do so, after being blocked and banned, on my reasonable comments against racism, transphobia, and about law outside the forum (including one comment that was nothing but the text of the 14th amendment), proving yourself in the process to be a racist, a transphobe, and an absolutely idiotic fascist who doesn't realize that kbin lets everyone see what you downvote.

I feel it's my civic duty to call your dumbass out, as you're clearly an unhinged, vengeance driven stalker who's likely doing the same or worse to other users.

As to the reverse trolling, I'll know I'm out of your head when you stop spam downvoting (which is really a useless effort, as you're gonna need at least another 2k downvotes a week to keep up). Calling you out on your dumbass nazi self is just icing on the cake.

Hey Arotrios, sorry for what you have to go through. I imagine you already know that, but I think it's worth reminding you : you can hide upvotes/downvotes in Lemmy's preferences by unticking the "show scores" option. That way, stalking and serial downvoting is just wasting the abuser time and finger's articulations. :) Honestly, rating everything people say is a toxic feature anyway, it's both addictive and generating anxiety. I'm glad Lemmy allows to disable it, I'm way more at peace since I've done it.

@anafroj Thanks for the kind words and advice - much appreciated. Unfortunately on Kbin (where I run my forum) we don't have that option - the software exceeds lemmy in many ways, but there are number of lemmy features (including removing downvotes) that I'd like to see on Kbin. I'm glad that the solution worked for you and your users.

To compensate on Kbin, since the forum I run is built as be a safe space for creative folks to submit OC and their inspirations, one of our rules is that if you downvote, you need to leave a comment explaining why. This allows critique without anonymous negativity, which adds nothing to the discussion.

As for myself, I don't care that the trolls above are obsessed with downvoting what my profile posts (which literally says "For Amusement Purposes Only" at the top - another indication that they can't read properly).

They tell more on themselves than I with the downvote spam, and it actually helps drive engagement with my commentary because they're triggering the "activity" sorting algorithm - it's not like reddit where enough downvotes will actually hide anything. But neither troll is smart enough to realize this, so that's why I just smile and tell them to keep digging. If they keep going, I get more upvotes through the additional views than they could possibly downvote, so that's a win from my perspective. If they get tired and stop, that's a bit of a win as well, even though they're no longer contributing to my marketing campaign... ;)

Oh, my bad, I have yet to get used to the fact that we're having the same discussions over different apps. :)

If you can install custom stylesheets (some options are documented here), I've tested this rule to work for removing downvotes:

.vote__down { display: none !important; }

It will work only for you, though, not for other people on your forum (unless you're an instance owner and can change the website stylesheets file).

An other rule to remove upvotes if you want to:

.vote__up { display: none !important; }
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He literally calls me out in threads every couple days because I downvoted something in his subreddit once.

It’s weird, creepy behavior. Don’t encourage him.

You got banned because you spam downvoted multiple comments without commentary, then continued the behavior after being asked to back up your downvotes with comments. You've escalated and continued the conflict by following me around the Fediverse downvoting my comments outside the forum - for over two weeks now. I will continue to call you out until your weird and creepy behavior stops.

You can play innocent all you'd like, but there's literally a public paper trail of your behavior, that any one can see by going through my comments and seeing the same two sad little trolls who downvote every comment they can.

You want me to go away, get the fuck out of my life. That's it.

You don't want to? Fine, I'll use your downvotes to call out your history as a racist, transphobe, fascist bigoted idiot again and again and again, because each time I do, folks are appreciative of being warned of your behavior, and I end up with new followers and traffic. Besides, I have no moral problem stalking a known stalker to keep them from harassing someone else.

This ain't one you're gonna win kid. Take a hint and your pacifier and go home to mommy.

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Seems like it must be possible. No idea how to do it.

Hah, you'd think, but everyone else makes it seem like not yet.

It should be possible, if someone implemented a proxy protocol. Just automatically take stuff from one side and duplicate/link it to the other side. Not sure if somebody has already started an implementation for this. If not, i guess it's not very far away.