Fediverse @lemmy.world 3dmvr @lemm.ee 4d ago

How should I be accessing the fediverse to get the most "federated" experience

The idea is cool with all the apps interconnecting, but where do I go to actually see this in practice. Does the cross communication only work on platforms like Mbin/piefed, or am I not seeing something.

I keep hearing thanks to activity pub posts here can be seen and replied to from elsewhere, but I haven't seen it.

42 comments

You will occassionally see some people from other platforms, like mastodon, commenting or posting here. But Lemmy isn't the most compatible one, so you probably won't see microblogs and such. If you want to see microblogs as well, use mbin (kbin fork). It is a mix of Lemmy and Mastodon. You can micro blog and comment on magazines (communities in the mbin/kbin platform) that way.

I especially am thinking of self hosting mbin because I do want to see some microblogs from some users.

Also I welcome you to Lemmy and the Fediverse. Good thing you didn't choose lemmy.world or lemmy.ml
- So I know there's some drama with lemmy.world and lemmy.ml. I'm passingly familiar with the .ml stuff (that they have a large and vocal population of tankies and red-fash types), but what's the deal with lemmy.world?
  
  It is in my opinion too big to join now as a new user, I think there are some issues with moderation also.
  
  Fediverse needs to scale horizontally so it is bad idea to join the largest server.
  
  LW's user base accounts for about 36.4% (as of writing this) of all Lemmy users (spread across approximately 570 instances according to FediDB), which is too large.
  
  Iirc the biggest complaint has been that community mods inside .world had some affinities or apologia towards Israel's war crimes
  
  Some people were worried they wouldn't allow users to advocate violence, which is bad. The rationale was that Dutch law supposedly prohibited it. Experiments were done and it was determined the admins allow advocating violence, which is good. But the site is full of power mods who remove calls for violence anyway, so it doesn't really matter what the admins allow.
- I joined world on accident the first time and dipped when I noticed the lack of piracy
- I saw someone posting from Pixelfed last week and that one surprised me, but I don't think they could reply to comments on the post if they could see them at all.
all the apps interconnecting

Evangelists say this but that's not actually what happens in practice. It might one day. ActivityPub is not a protocol, it's the concept of a protocol. Each platform uses AP slightly differently so there are subtle and big incompatibilities everywhere.

There are two main islands of interoperability. There's Mastodon and friends (Pixelfed, Misskey, Akomma, etc) then there's Lemmy and friends (Mbin, PieFed).

Mbin and Friendica do the best at federating with everything but they have shortcomings in other ways.

Just try stuff and explore, until you find a set of compromises you can live with. Take your time. I have a Mastodon account and a PieFed account.
@3dmvr In my experience, it works best with #Friendica. Firstly, it is the most widely federated (in addition to activity pub also #Diaspora + if required also Bluesky and Tumblr).
Secondly, in my experience, posts from the #Fediverse are displayed best and most completely. For example, this post by #Lemmy or #Peertube posts are displayed in full here, whereas Mastodon, for example, has problems with posts with headings, does not display video descriptions, and does not display all images.

Let's see if these images will be federated:

Mastodon, on the other hand, does not fully display starting posts with titles:
- Ok, with all pictures in replies it doesn't work yet or only in the other direction: This Lemmy thread seen from Friendica + Mastodon
  
  Friendica shows all pictures of Lemmy, both in posts and in replies. The other way round only in OP.
  
  Lemmy 0.20 will support comment images the way Mastodon/Frendica does them.
  
  I like that one, I think ill look into hosting that one for myself and learning more about it
Even though apps interconnect it's a good idea to use the best client for the service. But, sure - I can start following "@[email protected]" from my Mastodon account. It's also possible to subscribe to a Lemmy group from Mastodon, and reply to it.

But the best user experience is had by creating a Lemmy/Mbin account on such a server and interacting from there - like I am with my fedia.io account here now.
- Is fedia.io federating well with the "flagship" servers in the fediverse (pixelfed.social, mastodon.social, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml)? Because the thing that seems important to me if looking at interconnectivity is whether the subscring to a tag on a server actually makes me see what people post under that tag, and hopefully not omit a lot of posts because my instance doesnt know about them existing?
  
  Well it's difficult to know what you don't know, but the admin of fedia.io is the same as the admin of infosec.exchange et. al. and that's not a small instance. When people discuss Mbin instances my impression is that fedia.io would be one of the bigger ones.
Mbin + Interstellar on mobile probably? Be sure to adjust your filter to all or you won't see everything.
- Hope interstellar comes to ios, if yall wanna see it google interstellar ios and comment that you are someone who wants it, think the dev was gauging if it should be a priority and if ppl even want it
  
  I have it on Android and I love it!
- what do you mean adjust your filter? I'm on mbin but I'm pretty new.
  
  When you look at magazines for instance, you can change where it looks: Select "all" to look not just on your local Mbin, but through Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc.
@[email protected] well this is a post from a Sharkey instance, I see your post because I follow this community (which appears to me as a user boosting lemmy posts)
Also I’ve already posted on lemmy directly from my instance, I just have to tag the community I want to post into, and I receive replies as well.
It’s not perfect but it’s extremely helpful and cool
- How does sharkey compare to mbin/piefed?
  
  Yes, Sharkey is a microblogging service and it can't create headings, but it still displays them correctly. Among other things, this is better than with Mastodon.
  
  Sharkey is a fork of Misskey if I remember right. It's on the microblogging side with Mastodon, rather than a Reddit-like thing like Lemmy.
Join a big instance that's been around for awhile and blocked by the fewest amount of other servers
- The biggest Lemmy instance still isn't going to let you follow Mastodon or Pixelfed accounts.
  
  Yes, Lemmy accounts can only follow/subscribe to groups (besides Lemmy also mbin, piefed + also Peertube), but not individual accounts. A Lemmy account can only communicate with individual accounts if they write something in a community. That is one of the aims of mbin, to connect them: The structure of communities /magazines + a microblog feed.
- Or self host. Best federated experience, your own.
Should I be looking into Hubzilla and Friendica? They seem to connect to more protocols

42 comments