And it also seems that mastodon can also be “syndicated” to these other communities, and vice versa? Is that true?

Are there limitations to any of this?

Apologies if this is not the perfect place to ask this question. I’m a lost old man. :-)

  • Badabinski@kbin.social
    7·
    1 year ago

    Lemmy, kbin, and Mastodon all speak the same underlying protocol – ActivityPub. I’ve found that the best way to think of it is to compare it to email. If I send you an email from my gmail account to your outlook account, it just works (well, mostly, email is a bit of a mess lol) even though the two email clients look vastly different from each other. ActivityPub (and federated protocols in general) are like email, but for twitter/reddit.

    There are some different message types (it wouldn’t make sense to present twitter-like content in the context of a threaded forum like Reddit), and not all instance types support all the different message types. I’m using kbin (via kbin.social) and I can see Mastodon content, but I’m not sure if Lemmy has that ability.

    Not sure if that was helpful, and I hope that others come and fact check me, but that’s my understanding of it.

    • GoodKingElliot@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. I didn’t know they spoke the same underlying protocol.
      For fun and experimentation, I’m answering you from my Kbin account. I feel like a kid in a candy store playing with this new technology. Maybe Reddit’s suicide-by-greed is not entirely a bad thing.

      • Badabinski@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        I agree. I’m sad at the loss of my 12 year account over there and all the information it had built up. I’m sad to lose my niche hobby communities (for now). Even with that, I’m really hopeful that federated social media will eventually take off. Now we just need to make sure that major corporate interests don’t dig their gross claws into it (Meta is apparently making plans to do so).

      • mycus@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        Wanna try something crazy? Go to a mastodon instance like this one and put @asklemmy@lemmy.ml on the searchbar there.

        or do the inverse, look for someone local to mastodon, like @stux@mstdn.social and search in our searchbar. Result.

        I think this works even for unfederated things, then by doing that you end up federating them to the whole server.