This is shameless self-promotion, but part of a working theory I have that Mastodon users have more to offer Lemmy than your average Reddit user. See my other post about it here: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2174573
TLDR: Mastodon users are inherently active posters and already understand federation. Also there are MILLIONS of them.
Please consider following if you’d like to get more Lemmy in your Mastodon feed or more Mastodon users in your Lemmy feed!
In the meantime, here’s Mastodon’s Troy Saunders covering Lemmy’s Overkill.
This kind of integration is pretty much the whole point of kbin. People should be gravitating toward lemmy if they don’t want this and toward kbin if they do.
Kbin is pretty good for this. Every magazine has two tabs: one for microblogs, and one for threads. The administrator of the magazine can choose relevant hashtags, and all federated posts from the fediverse containing the hashtags will show up in the microblog section. People end up in kbin communities just by making themselves discoverable with hashtags, they don’t even need to know what kbin is.
There are, as far as I can tell, two problems:
- There’s no combined view showing both posts and microblog. As a consequence, the microblog is often neglected.
- Federation doesn’t work well - you only see these posts if you’re viewing it from the same kbin instance as the one you’re visiting from. In effect it’s basically only useful for kbin.social at the moment.
Still, both of these things seem like they could be resolved, and it’s a very neat solution. :)
It’s a neat solution, but I suspect, in the end, it kinda misses the broader point. From kbin, it may seem like a neat or good solution, but from mastodon magazines and communities, whether from kbin or lemmy, are equally opaque rather unusable entitles. Kbin’s solution works for filling up feeds on kbin. And, if the whole fediverse worked the way kbin works, it might be awesome!
But, it doesn’t, and so mastodon users still aren’t actually interacting with the conversations going on in communities and magazines, except for the relatively rare occasions that they make a top-level post or actually follow a community. Getting mastodon users off of mastodon and into our communities/magazines is what matters here (AFAIU). Their number and “fedi-readiness” make this a valuable goal. But also a potentially important one so that mastodon users learn that there’s more outside of their somewhat brutalist platform design and the idea of more complex and rich fediverse interactions becomes more normalised.
Broadly, I suspect the way forward will be having client apps that bring together various platform structures while the devs of each platform can focus on their platform without having to reinvent everything everytime they make a new platform or feature.
I’d love to have more Mastodon stuff in my lemmy feed. Shame its virtually impossible as far as I can see. Do you have any idea when lemmy devs might change this?
You can kind of get that on Kbin, though it shunts all the Mastodon stuff over to the “Microblogging” section. Also it’s not exactly bug free right now: a lot of the time you won’t see all of the replies to a post, especially if they’re replies to replies (and so on and so forth).
The idea is there though, and the devs are working on it constantly, so one day it should work correctly.
