cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1249965

Guide: One way you can take advantage of federation is by opening a different instance, like ds9.lemmy.ml, and browsing it. If you see an interesting community, post or user that you want to interact with, just copy its URL and paste it into the search of your own instance. Your instance will connect to the other one (assuming the allowlist/blocklist allows it), and directly display the remote content to you, so that you can follow a community or comment on a post. Here are some examples of working searches:

- [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) (Community)
- @[email protected] (User)
- https://lemmy.ml/c/programming (Community)  
- https://lemmy.ml/u/nutomic (User)
- https://lemmy.ml/post/123 (Post)
- https://lemmy.ml/comment/321 (Comment)

You can see the list of linked instances by following the "Instances" link at the bottom of any Lemmy page.

Takahē is a Python ActivityPub server whose original goal was supporting multiple domains from one install:

When I started the project, my main goal was to show that multi-domain support for a single ActivityPub server was possible; once I had achieved that relatively early on, I sort of fell down the default path of implementing a lightweight clone of Mastodon/Twitter.

I love the new direction, focusing on identity:

So, my new design goal is now to really take advantage of the multi-domain support and provide an experience that lets a diverse set of people, projects or companies, with a set of different domain names, logos and design ideas, all exist on the same server but still have their own profiles and identities that they can shape more in line with what they want.

Will support microblogging, but be focused on a sort of homepage functionality.

BlueSky AT Protocol Hashtags Proposals

https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/tree/main/0003-hashtags

The #Bluesky team has dropped a handful of proposals that cross protocol and UX. I really like what they have to say about hashtags.

Proposals
* visually separate tags
* allow spaces
* use curated tag search results
* mute words and hashtags
* opt-in hashtags

“The proposals here aren’t exactly ground-breaking. They boil down to two things: make the hashtags accessible, and then make them consistently useful.”

@dweb

The tooling we’re building for moderation tries to take into consideration how social spaces are formed and shaped through communities.

Today, we’re publishing some proposals for new moderation and safety tooling. The first focuses on user lists and reply controls which can be used for community-driven moderation. The second will focus on moderator services and how they can handle problems that small communities can’t. The third is for Hashtags, which are not directly related to moderation but can have a large effect on customizing what you see. (We wanted to include this to distinguish between the labeling proposal, which is intended to address moderation, and mechanisms for discovery.)

The goal of Bluesky is to rebuild social networking so that there’s not a lock-in to the founding company, which is us. We can try to provide a cohesive, enjoyable experience, but there’s always an exit. Users can move their accounts to other providers. Developers can run their own connected infrastructure. Creators can keep access to their audiences. We hope this helps break the cycle of social media companies coming into conflict with the open web.

The post goes on and is all good reading.

I did a bunch of experiments today and ... thoroughly confused myself, so I wrote down a bunch of things and took screenshots.

Here's what I learned:

(I have more protocol info but ultimately this is the lived experience of working across different software systems, federation, and the actual client / front end web experiences that people interact through)

Paste Lemmy URLs

Various things "just work" by pasting URLs into the Mastodon web interface or the Mastodon mobile app.

Posting the link to this post https://lemmy.ca/post/606549 finds this post

Clicking on the user profile shows me a profile for [email protected], with one post displayed. Including a follow button

Only one post is shown, because that's all that's available on the local server right now. If I chose to follow Doctor_Pi's Lemmy account, I'd get all of their posts going forward. Both OPs (which has a link to the post on Lemmy.ca) as well as comments (which appear as replies).

Limited support on other clients

Other clients (Ivory on iOS) have extremely variable support. You can't usually paste in Lemmy URLs, but you can paste in Lemmy accounts and follow them, and then see posts going forward.

Please leave a comment of what does / doesn't work in your particular client.

Follow Lemmy users on Mastodon

Every Lemmy user can be followed on Mastodon. So, for example, my Lemmy account @[email protected]. Paste that into the web interface of Mastodon or into the Mastodon native mobile app and you will find my Lemmy profile and can follow it.

Reply to a Lemmy post from Mastodon

If you reply to a Lemmy post using your Mastodon account, your reply will be posted as a comment. A user profile is created on the Lemmy instance.

I just did that with this very post, and it seems to have worked.

This is my [email protected] Mastodon account, viewed through news.cosocial.ca as a local user profile. All of that info -- including the images -- are from my Mastodon profile.

The comment is technically originally on Lemmy.ca.

Create new OP post from Mastodon

You can create new OP posts directly from Mastodon. @-mention the group name, e.g. @[email protected].

Here's my test post which ended up creating this post in /c/cosocial.

It works! Exactly how the post ends up looking in Lemmy is a bit variable, so more experimenting to be done

Follow Lemmy Communities on Mastodon

Screenshot of vaneats through CoSocial Masto web interface. You can see a little "group" label next to the name

I can't actually browse posts from here, don't know if that's a sync issue or what.

Here's a screenshot of @[email protected] which shows all the OP and comments.

All of the posts appear as boosts of the Lemmy accounts that are posting the content

Original

I reworked this post from a comment to LemmyCA Support on how the ActivityPub protocol works between Lemmy and Mastodon.

Using feedsin.space is pretty straightforward. First, you need to authenticate with the website by sending a message from your mastodon account to @[email protected] with the word "help". You'll get a response with a link you can click on to authenticate with the website. Then, you can create an account on feedsin.space by specifying a username for the account and the RSS feed you want to follow. Assuming everything looks good, there will be an account created at @[email protected], which you can follow from your Mastodon account,

Steps to use Feeds in Space

Send the word "help" to the @[email protected] account. In the screenshot, I'm sending a DM / private mention

The bot will respond with a login link, also via DM

I'm now logged in and can add feeds

If I hit logout, this is the screen I see. Basically, you follow the process of sending a help message every time to authenticate. My recommendation is that you do this as a DM to the admin account.

Note: currently, I haven't gotten any RSS feeds to validate correctly, so that may not be working

TIL that individual users can choose to block an entire instance.

I somehow thought this was a server admin only feature.

I made a series of images for an Instagram post I made about migrating to the fediverse. I figured I'd share with anyone else who wants to use, so I included some blank template versions too. DM if you'd like the Adobe Illustrator file so you can make your own edits. And please,comment if I got anything wrong so I can correct it.

A great series of images explaining the Fediverse as well as federation and defederation.

Have been translated into a number of languages, including French.

An example of gathering extended information about the servers / organizations that run Fediverse Galaxies.

People are welcome to add their own organizations, and it is available at the link provided as a set of browsable web pages, as well as a JSON feed for consuming programmatically.

RSS is also available for people who want to learn about new orgs as they get created.

The repo is here: https://github.com/CoSocial-Canada/FediverseGalaxies

This still needs the schema for orgs to be fleshed out, and then displayed on the post pages in a way that is visible.

Background

@[email protected] made a post about what they are calling Fediverse Galaxies -- organizations that run more than one fedi-service https://social.wake.st/@liaizon/110566074350880589

Much like CoSocial is experimenting with a Lemmy instance as well as the main Mastodon one.

I pointed out that more information about the orgs involved could be interesting:

What is the organization type? How is it governed? How is it funded? How is it moderated? How can members get involved? — those are some of the important questions.

I suggested a GitHub based "API" site, which is what this is.