The fediverse is working. I am now following (using Mastodon) a "Learning Rust" community on Lemmy [1], who I found through them commenting on my peertube video [2] using Lemmy.

[1] @learningrustandlemmy [2] https://diode.zone/w/wJJJ7DRh3fCvHq6KuZY3t9

#fediverse #rust #lemmy #peertube

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@andybalaam @learningrustandlemmy

This is an inception level of fediverse layers … I’m just rolling with it!
- Also, the lemmy - Peertube interop is cool! Fediverse should do more group actors!
  
  (And yes this is partly just to add to the inception depth)
Be aware that you won't see a lot of the comments on any particular post in a Lemmy community when following via Mastodon. There's a bit of a stalemate between the Lemmy Developers and the Mastodon Developers where they are each asking the other to bridge the gap of the incomplete federation.

Using another Mastodon-like service probably comes with additional similar issues.
So how did you follow from Mastodon?
- Any lemmy community is federated to mastodon as a user. So you follow by addressing the community as you would on lemmy, but with an “@“ instead of a “!” at the beginning. So @[email protected].
  
  That “user” then boosts all posts and comments that occur in the community, which is generally annoying when there are piles of posts and comments. For this community though it probably makes a lot of sense and might be more useful at this size than what lemmy does.
  
  Additionally, mastodon has lists which can be made exclusive so that items which go into a list do not show up in your home feed. So you could make one just for this community and check the list for any updates on anything that’s happening here. I might actually do this.
  
  If you like, you can then post to the lemmy community from mastodon. See https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110483509521476095 for a demo. Mainly useful if you want to connect communities on both platforms.
I also discovered Lemmy by following communities from Mastodon. The former is topic-focused, the latter people-focused, we need both, and better interaction between.
One issue for discoverability: Mastodon now has full-text search (used to be only hashtags), but only if a user opts in to this (settings). So can a Lemmy community or user opt in to be searchable from Mastodon ?
- Not currently, I don't think. Compare the results of:
  
  curl --location --header 'accept: application/activity+json' https://mastodon.social/@[email protected] | jq .
  
  with the results of:
  
  curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' https://mastodon.social/@andybalaam | jq .
  
  The first needs that --location because it just redirects back to lemmy.ml (unlike Lemmy, which has it's own copy for all remote actors).
  
  The second has 2 fields - 'indexable' and 'discoverable' - which probably dictate how searchable you are. The first doesn't have these. If they they were added, it might mean that community activity which had made its way to Mastodon would be searchable.
  
  But we can't add these ('cos we don't have the private keys for the Community) and Lemmy devs are unlikely to add them, 'cos they're meaningless to lemmy (could be wrong, but a lot of potential fediverse interaction is stymied by 'No, you fix your service to work with mine' cat fights)
  
  Thanks, such experiment taught me a trick. And I see that a lemmy user - also followable from mastodon- also lacks those two fields. Maybe it's not so hard to add that info (with an option in settings), but devs have their own priorities, so I suppose the point of this community is that more people learn how to submit PRs for details in lemmy?
Yup, this is the whole point of federation instead of just decentralisation.

This stuff is honestly incredible and the more I learn about it the more there is to appreciate.

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