I think I joined the Fediverse misunderstanding how it works. I went in under the belief that:
- Under the hood, everything is an ActivityPub post
- Lemmy, Mastodon, PixelFed, and PeerTube are "interfaces" or "views" for the underlying ActivityPub post
- All 4 can interact with eachother
- I only need 1 account
For the last point I found out that the answer is "yes...but actually no."
Based on the "ActivityPub Magic" thread (or Mastodon Post?), I see that Mastodon users can reply to the Lemmy thread (with some limitations) and follow Communities. Cool.
I see a Lemmy thread and a Mastodon post as serving 2 different purposes. Sometimes they overlap. But maybe I want to post something on my Mastodon timeline just for something general going on in my life that I don't necessarily want to post into a Lemmy community. Now let's say I started with a Lemmy account.
Unless I'm wrong, the only way to make that post would be to make a Mastodon account that's seperate from my existing Lemmy account.
I thought part of the beauty of the Fediverse was that someone could be following "me" and choose whatever "interface" they want. Instead it looks like they would be following "me@Lemmy", "me@Mastodon", "me@PixelFed", and "me@PeerTube".
And then there's the whole defederation of instances maybe requiring multiple accounts, but that's another topic. Now, to be clear I do see the use case of having multiple accounts for different instances (e.g. having a furry account and a general one).
Is there a roadmap for "merging" accounts between platforms? I understand that question might be more towards Lemmy/Mastodon/etc. developers than server admins, but just seeing if anyone here knows.
I'm new to this too so don't take me as an authority on the subject but I'm under the impression that Lemmy and Mastodon in particular were more compatible with each other but because they update separately they fell out of sync. I believe that currently mastodon users can interact with Lemmy posts and post to Lemmy communities but not vice versa. If you're interested in both I think kbin users can post to instances on both projects.
Imo, a better way to view the different projects is simply to think about what social platform they're filling a space of. Mastodon is like Twitter/Tumblr, while Lemmy is much more like reddit/forums. Pixelfed is like Instagram, peertube is like YouTube, etc etc etc. To me, since I was willing to have different accounts for all those social media I don't mind having multiple throughout the fediverse (though I believe that as it grows and more people work on it as a whole we'll see more projects interact with each other smoother)
Linking this article because I found it really helpful