I get that federation of content is one of the main selling points of the fediverse but doesn't there also come a point when the format of the content plays a part? Isn't there an argument to be made that content posted to one type of service (link aggregation) doesn't need to be shoehorned into the format of an entirely different type of service (microblogging)?
Lemmy
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].
You're right - it's great to be able to crosspost, but every fediverse software is totally allowed their own features and if other systems don't display it correctly, that's also ok.
But in this case, Mastodon really is missing some kind of "group" feature. We kind of have this with the a.gup.pe - Tool, but it would be nice to bring some order into that chaos.
I don't think it needs to be shoehorned at all.
I see this just as a small quality of life improvement of how it already works.
I think it would actually represent the way Lemmy works better than the way it works now :)
I am actually not sure, whether this needs to be fixed in the Lemmy source code or in the mastodon source code.
Mastodon
This is purely a Mastodon issue. They have been promising groups support for a while now, but it seems very low priority.
It has been in the works for a long time (since 2022): https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19059
Especially the way communities work on mastodon annoys me. I would love to follow some communities on mastodon, but I've had to unfollow all of them, because the comments take up my entire feed.
And the comments show up without the context of the original post, so I have to click on the comment, to enter the post thread it is a part of, and then scroll all the way to the top to see the post it is related to.
Maybe something about activity pub makes it hard to change, but it would be nice if it could be fixed :)
For this you would need an app (could be a web app) which lets you interact with lemmy as a mastodon user. The problem here is the UI and the format of the data. Currently format is something can't really help.
But find a UI app which lets you comments and follow through any mastodon/lemmy instance and display posts in lemny style.