So I did figure out that yes, #Mastodon can federate #Lemmy and #Kbin content. The problem is that Mastodon doesn’t know what to do with it, so it (the group) looks like a user that boosts all posts and comments.
I found myself browsing the “federated group” @selfhosted over on https://kbin.social, as I think Kbin has a nicer UX for it.
I didn’t really want to create a separate account for group stuff, but that might be what we do in the short term. 🤔
I wrote this in another thread, so copy pasting it here:
I believe that the limitation is part of the Mastodon app, and not related to the Fediverse. There might be a character limit but I don’t think it’s as limited as Mastodon’s.
Btw, Mastodon isn’t really fit for this type of conversation. Mastodon aims to replace tweeter - microblogging interaction, where Lemmy aims to replace Reddit - thread interactions.
Each comment on Lemmy will be treated as microblog on mastodon which isn’t really practical.
Except that that sounds like a Mastodon lack of features. Cuz Twitter had threads. As long as you were replying to someone each conversation was a sub thread and so on.
@mike Interesting, I haven’t really messed around too much with Mastodon. I’ve been primarily been using kbin and I’ve been happy with just this so far.
@NumbersCanBeFun @selfhosted Oh wow, I didn’t realize this would actually cross post to Lemmy.world. 😅
@NumbersCanBeFun Okay that was unexpected. I managed to post a new topic and reply to Lemmy.world using my Mastodon client. That was supposed to be a “thinking out loud” toot. 😅
I attached some images to my first reply, but they were ignored. I wonder if my server strips out markdown? 🤔
* _Test_
)
@mike It’s formatted well but whenever I click the link it 404’s on me for kbin. I know the server is getting some big upgrades and is under a lot of strain right now, so that might be a factor to consider, at least as far as kbin is concerned.
Ha, honestly I’m impressed that any of this is working at all. 😆
By the way, to anyone reading this, in my previous reply I omitted the mention of @selfhosted. The reply didn’t show up on #Lemmy until @NumbersCanBeFun replied to it.
@mike Same boat. I established an account over on Fosstodon during one of the Twitter exoduses. I like the UI more for kbin.social over Lemmy, so I think I’m here to stay. I tried out the federation between the two accounts, and figured out that mastodon really does twitter-like stuff really well. Kbin/Lemmy do reddit-like stuff really well. So I’m planning on just treating them like I treated Twitter and Reddit…as two separate services for different purposes with different UI’s.
My only issue is that I chose a different name when I signed up on kbin.social/Lemmy to match other accounts I have (one of which I recently changed to be in line with the rest), and it’s not what I have on Fosstodon, but I already moved once to a different instance (used to be on mastodon.social), I don’t really want to change usernames on Fosstodon. Frustrating a bit for me, but I’ll deal.
I tried my best to use mastodon as a platform to post to lemmy/kbin but ran into a major problem: nested comments get lost to the ether, and there’s no way for you to reply to them using the same account.
Because of this, and basically this alone, I decided to forfeit mastodon all together and opt for a self hosted lemmy instance. I just got it set up and running this evening and so far, I’m not looking back.
Might set up another mastodon instance later, but that’s if I start to miss it.
@Eddie If you include the group name (@selfhosted) it seems to work, but this isn’t really practical.
Hm, that’s very interesting. I wonder if the platforms will build upon each other with future updates or if they’ll continue to remain “seperate” in terms of formatting and QoL. Very interested in the future of cross platform federation accounts.
@Eddie I would love more interoperability. 😉
It makes me wonder if the “thing” to dethrone #Mastodon will be an alternative server/client/app that speaks multiple #Fediverse application protocols? I’m jealous that a #Lemmy server requires a _fraction_ of the RAM that a #KBin or Mastodon server does.
(Obligitory @selfhosted for Lemmy to notice me)
a #Lemmy server requires a fraction of the RAM that a #KBin or Mastodon server does.
If you want a personal microblogging server, run Pleroma or Akkoma, they are waaaAAAAAY less resource-intensive than Mastodon. Especially after some truly god-awful database queries were fixed in the last few months. (Load on my database server dropped by approximately a factor of 25x!!)
@ThorrJo @selfhosted lol, I can relate to thay 😆. I run an event & website that was notorious for its poor performance at the beginning and end of events. A few years ago, with our servers ready to fall over, I noticed a certain query was hogging the database server’s CPU. I made the tiniest fix to correctly use indexes, and we instantly went from 400% CPU usage to at most 20% (across 4 cores). 😅
Though it’s been fixed for ~3 years, I still see folks warning others about the slowness. 😅
@Eddie I know the kbin dev has been adjusting the federated backend to work better with mastodon. So I think it will all get better, it’ll just take time.
Oh wow, I didn’t realize I actually cross posted to #Lemmy by @'ing the group. 😅
@mike That is interesting, I was curious about whether it is possible to post to lemmy from mastodon… Seems like part of your message ended up becoming the title so I wonder if there is a way to format the message in a way that won’t look out of place on lemmy
The problem is of course that microblogs don’t have a title, so Lemmy just resorts to using the first words of the post. Kbin solves it differently, with microblogs being treated as entirely separate from the “threadiverse”. They are not given a headline, and downvotes are disabled.
If you want to make sure a microblog looks good in Lemmy I guess the best you can do is to use a descriptive first sentence, ideally followed by starting a new paragraph. As there’s no title field in microblogs, there’s really nothing else to do, and as kbin handles microblogs differently there will probably always be some weird headlines popping up in Lemmy unless something changes on the technical side.
@sab @selfhosted @mike Do you know if there is a way to make it a link post from masto or is that also just a limitation for microblogs? It seems like attaching media is at least possible.
I’m not sure how Lemmy handles microblogs with linked media, but at least in kbin it’s not possible to post a “thread” from a microblog service. In Lemmy the distinction matters less as they are all presented in the same feed. In kbin I expect microblog integration to get better in the future, but I think there will always be a distinction between “posts” and “threads”.
 can federate [#Lemmy](https://jammer.social/tags/Lemmy) and [#Kbin](https://jammer.social/tags/Kbin) content. The problem](https://cdn.masto.host/jammersocial/media_attachments/files/110/563/385/202/573/123/original/6c19ff38a284755e.png){kind=link}