Here’s the thing. I’m a mod for a small-time community for a niche interest, [email protected] 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 @[email protected] on my Mastodon instance and, while it’s good to be able to follow posts in feed form, it looks like ass: 
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?
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).
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.
At least I’m not crazy. Glad you agree.
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.
