this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2020
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Fully agree with this, so many people have been asking about federation with Mastodon, that I wonder if we need to officially announce that its not a priority.
Edit: This was asked mainly on our Mastodon account. So no offense @[email protected], I dont blame you for asking.
The way I look at it is that federation between different services using ActivityPub can be a huge differentiating factor from commercial social media. Commercial services are walled gardens because their incentive is to keep users on their service, and they see other services as competition for users creating a zero sum game scenario.
On the other hand, ActivityPub federation is a positive sum game. The more services federate with each other the more overall content is available to everybody in the federated network. I think this is the core argument for different services being interoperable.
I totally agree it's not a priority though, but definitely something to consider in the long term.
Sure, and Lemmy is completely open in that way, we are not preventing anyone from federating with Lemmy (in fact we would be happy to help with that). But its just a lot of work, and so far no developers have shown interest.
Right, it's something to look at in the future when there is time or help available.
Oh no, I don't doubt that you're all for federated platforms. Thing is, platforms like Mastodon / Pleroma shouldn't have to maintain special code for Lemmy, which seems to be what you're suggesting (?). It'd be easier for Lemmy to use standard protocols :-)
We are using the standard ActivityPub protocol (with some deviations needing to be fixed). But that protocol is extremely vast, and there are many different ways to do the same thing. Its possible that implementing federation with another project might take almost as much time as implementing Lemmy-to-Lemmy federation.
Can appreciate that. From reading the other post, I got the impression that the Lemmy project doesn't care about fediverse functionality, and I'm glad that's not the case (?).
I'm not doubting your statement, but could you explain what's a lot of work? If Lemmy speaks ActivityPub, shouldn't other services be able to accept its Activities and display them accordingly? I know there might be polishing that could be done to display them in a nicer way (by using one field instead of another, less characters in a certain field, etc)
EDIT: I saw your other comment about ActivityPub being vast. Is Lemmy using Activity's or Objects that aren't in wide use?
Lemmy speaks activitypub, but we are the very first to center around the activitystreams term groups, IE communities here. The entire rest of the fediverse is based around following federated users (IE, the twitter model), while we're focused on following federated communities (reddit / forum model).
So no other implementation supports group follows yet, and we likewise don't support user follows yet.
I understand a bit of ActivityPub, but I haven't done any development with it so excuse me if I'm mispeaking. Here's my understanding.
A Group is a type of Actor and a Person is a type of Actor. All Actors have an inbox and outbox. The actor
POSTs activities (Create,Delete, etc) to their own outbox, which other actors can view. AFollowsignifies to the receiving server that an actor at the originating server wants to know when there are new messages in the receiving actor's outbox. So when the actor adds a new activity to the outbox, the server would notify any follows, and they would check the outbox for the activities.So wouldn't following a group be the same as following a user? Software that supports one already knows how to support the other. I can see how a server may want to display messages from different actor types differently, but that's stylistic. Isn't a
Createfrom a group essentially the same as aCreatefrom a person?Afaik one problem with Mastodon are the HTTP signatures, because they are using an older version. So theres more than just ActivityPub which might need changes. And just figuring out what needs to be adjusted will take time.
A create post in a group, originates not from the group, but from one of its members, who may not even live on that server. Then that create needs to get pushed in some way to the federated community, which then needs announce to all its followers. Its very different from a person create, which always originates from the same server, and goes to its own followers.
Is there any specific software you think would be a better option to federate with over ActivityPub?
@[email protected] said that
Which could be interesting, but again even if it was feasible it would be a long ways off because the devs have clarified they are focused on making lemmy as good as possible for lemmy users before trying to make it work on other social medias.
Yeah I understand that it's a long ways before federation with other services happens. I was just curious if there was an ActivityPub software the devs would find better to federate with than Mastodon. Honestly I'm perfectly content with just Lemmy-Lemmy federation (:
Something which works similarly to Lemmy or Reddit is the obvious answer, such as littr or lotide. But afaik neither of them has federation anywhere close to ready.
But in fact there are so many things that need work on Lemmy itself, that we dont have much time to work on federation with other software (unless devs from the other side are also willing to get that working).
Reddit has user profiles, too, and I think it's a great possibility if you like a user to follow their posts or comments.
Federating with mastodon makes the most sense to me because its the most used and because the UI/UX would pair so nicely. A toot would be a post in your usernames community and a like would be an upvote. Replying to someones toot would be replying to their lemmy thread and likes on the reply would be upvotes. It just makes sense in my opinion and being able to view/comment in lemmy with a mastodon account would help grow lemmy and most mastodon users i come across are leftists and FLOSS advocates.
I think one of the goals of the federated decentralized social media is the ability to interface with other mediums. It's natural for enthusiasts in this community to be excited at the prospects of interoperability. Plus Mastodon is awesomesauce.
I think it would be nice to have the ability to add a mastodon toot into Lemmy and have it display the toot in a nice format and be linked to the toot's server, but I don't think replies to it should be standard from Lemmy since there likely could be different conversations occurring on different mediums.
I also think it would be nice to have PeerTube video integrated well into Lemmy but again the replies on Lemmy should not be the same as the replies on the Peertube format. Likely it will be a specific community focused discussion on Lemmy.
Pleroma already has communities and the same thing is coming to Pixelfed.
How are they doing communities?
So people don't have to maintain accounts on random services. Personally, I'd quite like to see new posts from Lemmy communities in my Mastodon feed.
Alright, I'll bite: that's just how I use the internet, you're free to do whatever you want. Regarding your question, I've never seen a need to do that, so I'm not sure. Have you tried this yourself?
Why wouldn’t they federate with mastodon? Its the most used and the simplest UX that could work across different federated software?
Is there some downside to the different projects federating with one another?