this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Mastodon has a ton of apps and Lemmy app development is going crazy right now. Are there any apps that can use both Lemmy and Mastodon accounts (and preferably Kbin accounts too)? I know the interfaces may need to be different, but the protocols are the same as far as I understand it, so it seems technically possible.

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not quite yet, it's assumed that some of the bigger Reddit apps that are shutting down may do all three to maximise their userbase.

[–] FartsWithAnAccent 40 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Relay for Lemmy as well, but they actually seem to be trying to adapt to the new API for whatever reason.

[–] Draconic_NEO 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Infinity dev wants to go that route as well (paid subscription) thankfully Infinity is open source so people are doing what the dev won't do and forked it to add support for other platforms as well as supplying your own API key to use Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I saw that and will try it out eventually out of curiosity.

[–] dingus 4 points 1 year ago

Sadly I think the RIF dev is moving to Tildes

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

That would be great. It’ll take some pretty good UI/UX design to make a single experience that works well for both types of communities. Looking forward to seeing what developers come up with.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Fedilab handles mastodon, pixelfed and peertube in one app. It's the most multifunctional app I know of. Pretty impressive, but it doesn't do lemmy/kbin, or even misskey.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But isn't it true that mastodon users can follow Lemmy communities as if the community was a virtual user? So in a sense you can view Lemmy through Fedilab but you have to be logged in thru mastodon or pixelfed?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It isn't working perfectly, I tried following [email protected] from mastodon and couldn't.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

@ragica
i think it probably will in time

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

+1 for Fedilab It could use some improvements, but I am quite happy with it being able to look at multiple servers and follow different user from a single place.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Technically all of them work already, just with subpar UI. If you follow a Lemmy community on Mastodon by searching for it like a user, the community’s posts show in your Mastodon timeline.

Each community post appears as a Mastodon post boosted by the community “user”. Threaded replies all work.

To make a post to a community, you tag the user in any top-level Mastodon post.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Subpar UI really is what kills almost everything...

I can't be tired of saying how much I hate mastodon's default UI, where you can't pull posts from users simply because you server doesn't synchronize (what's wrong with pulling it straight from the original server)? Imagine if you subscribed to a community on Lemmy and it only showed posts AFTER you subscribed...

Or the follow menu that says "please copy and paste this on your app"... Really? If you check docs.joinmastodom....something it even says "just type your username@domain and we will do a remote follow"

I think Lemmy apps will evolve faster and show others what is needed to progress quickly. This is natural when considering how Lemmy users interact with each other.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have been really surprised by how little progress Mastodon has made in terms of features. Especially compared to something like Calckey.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It really is a little embarrassing for the fediverse I think. Many of the people that went back to Twitter essentially did so because of a lack of features. Some of those were controversial like QTs, but all around it’s a rather spartan platform that sometimes feels like it doesn’t want you to socialise too much.

That being said, it’s also the most stable and snappy. Calckey, I think, has some problematic performance issues. And Lemmy has its issues too, though I’m fairly hopeful they’ll get fixed over time. Mastodon, once you get used to it, kinda just works. For competing platform devs it’s a quality probably worth noticing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think the biggest problem with that is all the people complaining about "meta" trying to get into the fediverse (don't get me wrong, I am not a meta user).

Because the protocol is open, it is impossible to stop it. If meta does make a product with better UI, even if they don't change the underlying protocol, guess what the majority of people will be using?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yep. Meta have even announced that they will allow people to migrate from mastodon to meta’s platform.

Meanwhile mastodon have no such feature for migrating from anywhere else to mastodon. And you can bet it won’t be easy to perform the migration away from meta.

More deeply, it seems to me that the fediverse hasn’t really appreciated that it needed to find ways to work together and not reinvent the wheel for every new platform or UI. As a result, its killer feature should have emerged by now but hasn’t, arguably at all … namely the whole fediverse and all its various platforms becoming one giant “actually meta” platform. This requires good interoperstion and good standards etc. But once you’ve got it, any new feature or idea anywhere can contribute to the whole and stay behind the reach of any big corp’s abilities. Instead, the fediverse is a bunch of separate and small independent hackers trying to clone big social platforms without much help and now in a race to stay ahead of big corporations.

If the fediverse dies, failing to create modular and composable software will probably be the ultimate killer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Exactly. I've even seen a fair amount of Mastodon essentialism when alternates are brought up, but in order to prevent a takeover we need a healthier ecosystem than anything they can offer. I think the threadiverse is in a healthier place with two major alternatives that have slightly different overall ideas about which direction things should go. All that said I love Mastodon. In my mind the killer feature for any of these apps is still a smart, private take on an intelligent content algorithm designed around human growth and personalization rather than doom scrolling and ad views.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Imagine if you subscribed to a community on Lemmy and it only showed posts and comments AFTER you subscribed…

If you're on a small instance, that's actually the case with Lemmy, lol. You can only see a remote community if someone from your instance subscribed to it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You can see the remote community once you search and you can see all posts in that community, from your server.

On Mastodon, even after you subscribe, you CANNOT see old posts on your instance, unless you put each post url individually in the search bar.

So, not the same at all.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

This is such a clever part of the protocol. So many different UIs are possible with the same underlying framework and data.

[–] TheSpookiestUser 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I was trying to figure this out earlier - does this work in reverse? Can I interact with mastodon posts through lemmy's interface?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I haven’t found a way to, and when I visit Lemmy communities via Mastodon, I can’t really post or upvote or downvote. The UI is totally different- literally like browsing Reddit using Twitter’s interface. An app that truly combines them will either need two interfaces or some pretty brilliant UI/UX design to make everything work in one interface

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

it would be exactly like kbin - a tab for microblogs and a tab for threads, with a ui fitting for each

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[–] Hangglide 2 points 1 year ago

As a former Reddit user, I understood none of those sentences.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] faltuuser 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can see posts on Lemmy community already. But can't see comments. Also no iogin for now.

[–] Draconic_NEO 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wasn't able to view Lemmy content (actually any content) on the build I downloaded. How did you view them on yours?

[–] faltuuser 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

First goto 3 dot menu > more options > go to subreddit Then input the lemmy community name in the following format : lemmy:[email protected] to visit https://lemmy.world/c/android

[–] Draconic_NEO 3 points 1 year ago

Ah I see thank you for telling me. I just tried it and it seems to work, though it is a bit finicky (gives random 502 errors) but that's to be expected from alpha software. Hopefully this will get better in the future.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How? Mine just turns up empty, and as you say, you can't login yet

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Draconic_NEO 3 points 1 year ago

It's still in Alpha, you can still try it out but I warn you it's very very buggy at the moment. It does have a lot of potential though, hopefully it'll get better as time goes on.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm still experimenting but it looks like I'll be using Mastodon as my hub - I can follow users on the Fediverse and communities on Lemmy. As I can follow my various Fediverse accounts (and bring them all together in a list) I can post about any of it to my feed there.

This interoperability may be a big selling point of the Fediverse - rather than competing apps that try and keep users within their own spheres of control, the Fediverse apps play nicely together, so you can use the right tool for the job and then post about it elsewhere. So I may use Pixelfed for photo sharing or Peertube for videos, but it is trivial to also post about this on Mastodon and not that much effort make a post on it in Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Following communities from mastodon is generally a very poor experience IMO.

Mastodon doesn’t display threads at all, it’s just a long trail of posts without any structure. Not to even mention the structure of post with comments inside.

Beyond that there are basically no feed sorting tools. And while you can use lists, they take quite a bit of work to maintain, and, annoyingly, aren’t exclusive so that everything you follow still ends up in your home timeline creating a real firehose especially with active lemmy communities.

The only platform design that can be actual hubs are kbin and friendica AFAICT. Kbin is a bit rough around the edges and friendica is like Facebook (which may suit many people actually) and quite capable.

Mastodon, IMO, does what it does well, but is a an annoying limited platform.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn't kbin compatible with both Lemmy and Mastodon? I see tons of Mastodon content in the Microblog tab currently

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I believe it is, yeah. I hear kbin.social's servers are absolutely swamped right now and having lots of issues, so I don't want to contribute to that, but I'm probably going to make a kbin instance my home soon. Does anyone know where to find a list of instances kbin.social has defederated?

[–] DeadNinja 11 points 1 year ago

I may be wrong, but of all the apps (Android) currently being developed or planned for development - I think I've read that Artemis will support all three - Mastodon, Lemmy and KBin.

This is their KBin magazine

https://kbin.social/m/ArtemisApp

[–] Yoz 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am using thunder and its been great so far. Look and feel is like Infinity for Reddit. Its on Github and izzydroid repo in Fdroid.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How does it feel on Mastodon posts? Are you able to follow Mastodon users?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

lemmy isn't federated with mastodon(for now)

[–] Draconic_NEO 2 points 1 year ago

Probably due to not being compatible with Microblogging/Profile posts. If they added that feature they could probably make mastodon stuff work.

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[–] MrsDoyle 7 points 1 year ago

I've got all the apps in a folder on my phone. It's like a bag of sweeties I can dip into - they're logged in as different users in various instances, hence very different flavours.

I much prefer the Fediverse to Reddit, it's much more interesting.

[–] lwuy9v5 6 points 1 year ago

KBin handles mastodon (at least to some degree)? So I think that would be the one - that supports itself, lemmy, and mastodon

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