I know it's possible to subscribe to a Mastodon user on a Lemmy instance, but it seems to me like this is of limited utility since the more standard use case on Mastodon is following tags rather than users. So, is it possible to somehow follow a Mastodon tag using Lemmy and get posts with that tag integrated into your Lemmy feed?
Edit: Never post before fully woken up. It is not possible to subscribe to another user directly on Lemmy, whether they’re on Lemmy or Mastodon. That’s how things work on Mastodon, not on Lemmy. It is possible to find Mastodon users by using the instance search feature, though, as I’ve described in a reply to @[email protected] below, but you so far can’t really use this to achieve anything very useful, as far as I can tell.
Edit 2: It seems like something like this theoretically could be set up, but it's way more complicated than what I initially asked for. You would need:
- A dedicated Lemmy instance for Mastodon tag-based crossposting (probably)
- Some kind of form on a site where users who want to follow a Mastodon tag that is not already set up as a Lemmy community could submit the tag they want added, which would automatically set up:
- A Lemmy community for that tag on the aforementioned instance, and
- A Mastodon hastag bot that automatically crossposts all Mastodon posts with that tag to that community
Whether something like this already exists, I have no idea, but I get the feeling it could actually be useful.
Guilty as charged. I'll say though, there are several legitimate reasons why one might want to do this. I personally use it as a substitute for Reddit's multireddit feature, by grouping community subscriptions across different instances by theme. As long as users use the same username across instances I don't think this practice should be automatically regarded as an attempt to sockpuppet. It that was the goal, the accounts would definitely not be using the same username across all the instances.