And it also seems that mastodon can also be “syndicated” to these other communities, and vice versa? Is that true?
Are there limitations to any of this?
Apologies if this is not the perfect place to ask this question. I’m a lost old man. :-)
Yes, that is one of the features of being federated. Kbin and Lemmy and Mastadon (and others) can all federate with each other, so posts and comments are all shared. It doesn’t really matter if you’re on Kbin or Lemmy, you can see the same communities/magazines and comments for the most part, and interact regardless of which one you are currently logged in to.
Well, my understanding is that email is federated, and SMS text messages are federated, but it isn’t easy to email a phone number, or send a text to someone’s email. So I’m surprised that Kbin and Lemmy can talk to each other.
But I see someone else answered that Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon all speak the same underlying protocol, ActivityPub. Now it’s starting to make sense.
I think your example of email and SMS messages is a good analogy… Just because they can talk to each other doesn’t mean the presentation is always correct. For example I’m on Lemmy, and I have seen replies by people on Mastodon in these threads. However the Mastodon replies have a different formatting so you will see the leading @user1 @user2 types stuff on those replies which really stands out when you’re reading from a threaded interface. And I can’t imagine how you would navigate through a lemmy/kbin post while using Mastodon.
So yes, you could get to everything from a single user account, but I find it better to still have different accounts on Lemmy and Mastodon just to make it easier to view things in the intended presentation method. Maybe some day there will be flags embedded in each post so that one interface knows how to properly format what you are reading, we’re just not there yet.
Great take, and honestly I’m so excited to see what the future holds for development of new features, UX, and new paradigms on ActivityPub
Hard to imagine what this will all look like five years from now, but after seeing how it’s grown over the last year alone I’m very excited
(Also a plug for a growing community: kbin/m/genart for generative art of all kinds at all levels, if you like genart come hang out!)
It’s easier if you imagine that kbin and Lemmy are simply the underlying email servers in this analogy and the email itself (content) is what’s happening across the ActivityPub protocol.
but it isn’t easy to email a phone number,
Mildly off topic, and showing my age a bit on this one but it 100% is easy, as long as the telco in question supports it.
I used to be with Koodo up here in Canada (albeit this was years ago) and the ability to send/receive emails via your phone number was trivial. Literally could email 5555555555[AT]msg.koodomobile.com and it would be received, and when you reply the other side gets the email reply.
Whether companies still do this on the other hand, is the question (that no one asked lol).
Yeah, however I think this doesn’t mean email and sms share the same protocol like kbin and Lemmy. I am guessing that the service provider (koodo in this case) is serving as a relay, basically people email koodo, and koodo forward that email to your phone.
This is how I got ringtones I made onto my phone. I’d just attach the .wav file to my email and it would show up as an MMS.
It’s still a thing. At least with Gmail accounts:
I think text to email is pretty universally supported. I work with clients who text my email address, and as far as I can recall I’ve always received the messages and been able to reply.
Lemmy, kbin, and Mastodon all speak the same underlying protocol – ActivityPub. I’ve found that the best way to think of it is to compare it to email. If I send you an email from my gmail account to your outlook account, it just works (well, mostly, email is a bit of a mess lol) even though the two email clients look vastly different from each other. ActivityPub (and federated protocols in general) are like email, but for twitter/reddit.
There are some different message types (it wouldn’t make sense to present twitter-like content in the context of a threaded forum like Reddit), and not all instance types support all the different message types. I’m using kbin (via kbin.social) and I can see Mastodon content, but I’m not sure if Lemmy has that ability.
Not sure if that was helpful, and I hope that others come and fact check me, but that’s my understanding of it.
Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. I didn’t know they spoke the same underlying protocol.
For fun and experimentation, I’m answering you from my Kbin account. I feel like a kid in a candy store playing with this new technology. Maybe Reddit’s suicide-by-greed is not entirely a bad thing.Wanna try something crazy? Go to a mastodon instance like this one and put
@asklemmy@lemmy.mlon the searchbar there.or do the inverse, look for someone local to mastodon, like
@stux@mstdn.socialand search in our searchbar. Result.I think this works even for unfederated things, then by doing that you end up federating them to the whole server.
Get really wild. Try answering from Calckey, or Friendica. Or see if you can follow a PeerTube channel.
What is really cool is that you can mix and match features, like if you follow a Mastodon user on Misskey and vice versa, the Mastodon user can see the Misskey users full 5000 character post, even though Mastodon is limited to 500 chars.
I agree. I’m sad at the loss of my 12 year account over there and all the information it had built up. I’m sad to lose my niche hobby communities (for now). Even with that, I’m really hopeful that federated social media will eventually take off. Now we just need to make sure that major corporate interests don’t dig their gross claws into it (Meta is apparently making plans to do so).
I feel like Meta going into the fediverse shows that they can see the tide rising on decentralized social media. My main concern with the Meta instance is more about whether or not they’ll support account migration.
To me, the killer feature of the fediverse is the account migration. (it’s coming eventually to kbin)
Sure it’s nice (actually awesome) to see content from so many diverse communities… But the killer app is being able to move to a new server when you need to and get your followers to automatically follow you at the new location. This prevents enshittification to a large degree, because there’s no lock-in network effects.
Kbin may allow migrating between Kbin instances, but would they support migration to Lemmy instances? If not then not sure we could expect Meta to support it either.
Pure speculation but I think a likely scenario is Meta would have all their accounts registered on a centralised server, and only have the content decentralised.
All fediverse software (lemmy, kin, mastodon, etc) implements their own version of ActivityPub in slightly different ways. There are cases where the overlap is enough to cross over (lemmy communities and kbin magazines), and some where it doesn’t work/is wonky (lemmy users can’t follow mastodon users).
There’s a more in depth write up here if you’re curious: https://overengineer.dev/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-thoughts-one-year-later.html
I’m answering your post from kbin, you can see Lemmy instances and communities from Kbin!
Then wait until you find that you can follow Lemmy/kbin communities from Mastodon and comment on Lemmy/kbin posts from your Mastodon account 🤭
how do you do this?
Search for the user/community name you want.
