Fediverse

At the moment Lemmy and Kbin federate exactly, Lemmy communities and Kbin magazines federate 1:1 with upvotes, downvotes, comments, all working as expected.

Mastodon users can follow communities and magazines as though they were users, post to them, and see replies. Although they see everything linearly. If you ever see a community post that starts by tagging the community that likely came from mastodon.

Lemmy does not currently, and may never, allow you to follow mastodon users or tags. Kbin offers a microblog view that does display mastodon content in its intended form.

I'm new to it as well and I've been poking around for info recently, so take this with a grain of salt.

Fediverse = Lemmies + Mastodons + Pixfed + all the other things that use Activity pub. They can, more or less, all talk to each other. So you can, more or less, get stuff from Lemmy on Mastodon and vice versa. But for right now, it looks like that can be a bit of a hassle -- or at least more of a hassle than we're used to with centralized services like FB, IG, Twitter, etc. You generally have to look them up and get a specific link and search on your own instance and follow.

But the fact that they can do this at all, and that so many people are working on making it better, means it will probably become easier and easier over time. And the more you play around with them, the less of a hassle it becomes.

My takeaway, for the moment, is that it's simpler to keep Mastodon and Lemmy as two separate things, but it's not so hard to cross instances within each of them. And since I am still new to this, I've joined a few instances of each to get a feel for them. Signups for both are really simple. The main thing I look at to decide if I'd want to join is their local feeds -- the things you could browse easily if you joined that instance. I feel like it gives you a sense of who's there and what they're posting and what the instance's main interests are.

I've been using lemmy.world as a general instance and joined beehaw.org and mander.xyz for more focused instances with different approaches to moderation and federation. But following communities across instances is pretty easy to do once you try it out. So that means you could have just one single instance and still follow interesting people or communities across all the other instances out there.

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.

You really need to just test on a piecemeal basis. It's a matter of what works with what, and sometimes even the devs don't know.

What I've found so far:

Lemmy uniquely grabs old posts from Lemmy, but most software is "here and now" so you won't see a history if you go somewhere until your instance is following it.

Mastodon can see Lemmy communities and users and you can DM people on mastodon from lemmy, but you can't follow Mastodon users on Lemmy because the paradigm is different.

Lotide communities can be followed and interacted with. I think the latest Lemmy has fixed federation in the other direction.

Friendica groups can be followed and interacted with. Users are the same as mastodon users

Peertube channels can be followed like communities and you can see, upvote, and comment on videos, but you can't post anything new -- your instance will let you, but it won't federate.

Kbin communities can be followed, be aware that kbin is in its early days so it has a lot of work on the back-end.

I was not able to federate with a.gru.ppe communities.

Hopefully this helps, and maybe others can post their discoveries. Decentralization is strength on the fediverse. The more things we can connect to, the less reliant we are on any one thing.

To do a lot of these, you put the community, magazine, or channel url into Lemmy search. It takes longer than you expect but if it's federating at all it'll show up on the search, then you can go and subscribe.

Honestly, just realized you could do it. It's so weird looking but so incredible nonetheless. This has so much potiential to be so much bigger.