Any apps for the whole fediverse? (Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon?)

fieldhockey44@sh.itjust.works to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 79 points –

Mastodon has a ton of apps and Lemmy app development is going crazy right now. Are there any apps that can use both Lemmy and Mastodon accounts (and preferably Kbin accounts too)? I know the interfaces may need to be different, but the protocols are the same as far as I understand it, so it seems technically possible.

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Not quite yet, it's assumed that some of the bigger Reddit apps that are shutting down may do all three to maximise their userbase.

That would be great. It’ll take some pretty good UI/UX design to make a single experience that works well for both types of communities. Looking forward to seeing what developers come up with.

Fedilab handles mastodon, pixelfed and peertube in one app. It's the most multifunctional app I know of. Pretty impressive, but it doesn't do lemmy/kbin, or even misskey.

But isn't it true that mastodon users can follow Lemmy communities as if the community was a virtual user? So in a sense you can view Lemmy through Fedilab but you have to be logged in thru mastodon or pixelfed?

+1 for Fedilab It could use some improvements, but I am quite happy with it being able to look at multiple servers and follow different user from a single place.

Technically all of them work already, just with subpar UI. If you follow a Lemmy community on Mastodon by searching for it like a user, the community’s posts show in your Mastodon timeline.

Each community post appears as a Mastodon post boosted by the community “user”. Threaded replies all work.

To make a post to a community, you tag the user in any top-level Mastodon post.

Subpar UI really is what kills almost everything...

I can't be tired of saying how much I hate mastodon's default UI, where you can't pull posts from users simply because you server doesn't synchronize (what's wrong with pulling it straight from the original server)? Imagine if you subscribed to a community on Lemmy and it only showed posts AFTER you subscribed...

Or the follow menu that says "please copy and paste this on your app"... Really? If you check docs.joinmastodom....something it even says "just type your username@domain and we will do a remote follow"

I think Lemmy apps will evolve faster and show others what is needed to progress quickly. This is natural when considering how Lemmy users interact with each other.

I have been really surprised by how little progress Mastodon has made in terms of features. Especially compared to something like Calckey.

It really is a little embarrassing for the fediverse I think. Many of the people that went back to Twitter essentially did so because of a lack of features. Some of those were controversial like QTs, but all around it’s a rather spartan platform that sometimes feels like it doesn’t want you to socialise too much.

That being said, it’s also the most stable and snappy. Calckey, I think, has some problematic performance issues. And Lemmy has its issues too, though I’m fairly hopeful they’ll get fixed over time. Mastodon, once you get used to it, kinda just works. For competing platform devs it’s a quality probably worth noticing.

I think the biggest problem with that is all the people complaining about "meta" trying to get into the fediverse (don't get me wrong, I am not a meta user).

Because the protocol is open, it is impossible to stop it. If meta does make a product with better UI, even if they don't change the underlying protocol, guess what the majority of people will be using?

Imagine if you subscribed to a community on Lemmy and it only showed posts and comments AFTER you subscribed…

If you're on a small instance, that's actually the case with Lemmy, lol. You can only see a remote community if someone from your instance subscribed to it.

You can see the remote community once you search and you can see all posts in that community, from your server.

On Mastodon, even after you subscribe, you CANNOT see old posts on your instance, unless you put each post url individually in the search bar.

So, not the same at all.

This is such a clever part of the protocol. So many different UIs are possible with the same underlying framework and data.

I was trying to figure this out earlier - does this work in reverse? Can I interact with mastodon posts through lemmy's interface?

I haven’t found a way to, and when I visit Lemmy communities via Mastodon, I can’t really post or upvote or downvote. The UI is totally different- literally like browsing Reddit using Twitter’s interface. An app that truly combines them will either need two interfaces or some pretty brilliant UI/UX design to make everything work in one interface

The UI of squabbles.io actually feels good for this. It's a shame it's closed-source and doesn't federate.

it would be exactly like kbin - a tab for microblogs and a tab for threads, with a ui fitting for each

I've been planning on trying out Infinity for Everything

You can see posts on Lemmy community already. But can't see comments. Also no iogin for now.

I wasn't able to view Lemmy content (actually any content) on the build I downloaded. How did you view them on yours?

First goto 3 dot menu > more options > go to subreddit Then input the lemmy community name in the following format : lemmy:android@lemmy.world to visit https://lemmy.world/c/android

Ah I see thank you for telling me. I just tried it and it seems to work, though it is a bit finicky (gives random 502 errors) but that's to be expected from alpha software. Hopefully this will get better in the future.

Uh, what is this?

Speaking as someone who used Infinity for Reddit.

It's a fork that aims to add support to Infinity for a bunch of other platforms, among those kbin and lemmy. It'll also let you use Reddit but that'll be much more limited than before since you need to provide your own API keys and you won't be able to access NSFW.

Amazing. Loved Infinity for Reddit. I'll definitely keep my eye on this.

Isn't kbin compatible with both Lemmy and Mastodon? I see tons of Mastodon content in the Microblog tab currently

I believe it is, yeah. I hear kbin.social's servers are absolutely swamped right now and having lots of issues, so I don't want to contribute to that, but I'm probably going to make a kbin instance my home soon. Does anyone know where to find a list of instances kbin.social has defederated?

I may be wrong, but of all the apps (Android) currently being developed or planned for development - I think I've read that Artemis will support all three - Mastodon, Lemmy and KBin.

This is their KBin magazine

https://kbin.social/m/ArtemisApp

I am using thunder and its been great so far. Look and feel is like Infinity for Reddit. Its on Github and izzydroid repo in Fdroid.

How does it feel on Mastodon posts? Are you able to follow Mastodon users?

lemmy isn't federated with mastodon(for now)

Probably due to not being compatible with Microblogging/Profile posts. If they added that feature they could probably make mastodon stuff work.

I'm still experimenting but it looks like I'll be using Mastodon as my hub - I can follow users on the Fediverse and communities on Lemmy. As I can follow my various Fediverse accounts (and bring them all together in a list) I can post about any of it to my feed there.

This interoperability may be a big selling point of the Fediverse - rather than competing apps that try and keep users within their own spheres of control, the Fediverse apps play nicely together, so you can use the right tool for the job and then post about it elsewhere. So I may use Pixelfed for photo sharing or Peertube for videos, but it is trivial to also post about this on Mastodon and not that much effort make a post on it in Lemmy.

Following communities from mastodon is generally a very poor experience IMO.

Mastodon doesn’t display threads at all, it’s just a long trail of posts without any structure. Not to even mention the structure of post with comments inside.

Beyond that there are basically no feed sorting tools. And while you can use lists, they take quite a bit of work to maintain, and, annoyingly, aren’t exclusive so that everything you follow still ends up in your home timeline creating a real firehose especially with active lemmy communities.

The only platform design that can be actual hubs are kbin and friendica AFAICT. Kbin is a bit rough around the edges and friendica is like Facebook (which may suit many people actually) and quite capable.

Mastodon, IMO, does what it does well, but is a an annoying limited platform.

KBin handles mastodon (at least to some degree)? So I think that would be the one - that supports itself, lemmy, and mastodon

Is there any app currently that does misskey or kbin?