Mastodon and Lemmy both use the same underlying protocol, but are fundamentally different types of content with different paradigms for interacting with it.
There are folks working on combining the two into an app or platform - Kbin is one - but mashing the content together is going to give the garbage UX you describe.
Kbin is a Lemmy clone that has a mastodon client built in. It uses slightly different terminology (e.g. magazines instead of communities) but is otherwise functionally the same.
So I’ve since gathered that this isn’t true. As I understand, and I could be wrong, Kbin doesn’t provide a feed of the people you follow in the same way mastodon etc do. Instead the microblog view is a view of the comments in all the magazines without being organised under posts. It’s like the “comments” view we have here on lemmy but threaded (I asked if we could have the same here: lemmy.ml/post/1932250).
Instead the microblog view is a view of the comments in all the magazines without being organised under posts.
No, that's absolutely not the case. From the microblog feed, I'm able to find my own posts from Calckey and PixelFed (e.g. https://kbin.social/u/@[email protected]), neither of which have touched or in any way interacted with n a kbin magazine.
You can follow users on kbin, but AFAICT you don't have home or local timelines, only federated/global. Instead, these stream of posts that are not addressed to a Group actor can be mined for hashtags by magazines, and those posts with matching tags get shown in a magazine's Microblog tab. Any posts that are untagged, or which cannot be assigned to at least one magazine, get dumped into m/random's Microblog feed.
Threads are specifically addressed the Group Actors. Comments belong to whatever they replied to. Microblog posts neither address a Group Actor nor are in reply to a thread or thread comment, and so are fundamentally detached from the core threadiverse ecosystem.
And yea, I was aware of the m/random feed and it being basically a global feed. I obviously wasn’t clear on what exactly goes in there.
But, as someone who doesn’t find the global/federated feed useful/interesting (and from polls I’ve seen, this is the same for most people), I don’t think the microblog view would hold any value for me or most people for that matter.
It kinda does. But the problem is the microblogs people post to the groups on kbin drown it out.
I followed elonjet on my instance. If I click on the main kbin page then microblog (NOT from a group, since it will filter only microblogs to the group) and scroll I will find the elonjet updates along with all the other stuff people probably mistakenly posted by clicking + and then add post instead of add thread (probably because reddit called them posts).
So it does work correctly. If you filter out all the microblogs that were probably posted by mistake.
Oh and you can get directly to only the specific content by clicking your name in top right, profile, followed and choosing the followed user. You'll see all their posts there.
As mentioned by @Kichae above, the microblog section, while it will contain posts by people you follow, seems to essentially be a global or federated feed of everything that goes through the instance … so it’s not just the microblogs posted to groups drowning things out then … ?
How would you filter out all of the microblogs posted by mistake? If the microblog section is like a global feed, how could you filter out everything but those you follow?
I don’t want to be too critical of kbin here, especially as it’s young platform with a bright future, but it shouldn’t be too hard to explain how to get a feed of the people you follow … right? Unless it’s just not possible? In which case, people should really stop saying that kbin is lemmy + mastodon. From the perspective of writing posts to both platforms, it seems to fit the bill nicely, especially with the nice hashtag->magazine feature. But for reading a feed, it appears to not have the mastodon side covered at all.
Is this on the roadmap (I would guess so)?
IMO, there is a tad too much “hype” or “overselling” happening on the fediverse. Excitement is good, obviously. But I’ve seen a bit too much factually incorrect statements about what is possible with a specific platform, which, IMO, only do harm by either leading someone to disappointment or feeling like a platform is too hard to use because they can’t work out how to do something that isn’t actually possible. I certainly felt that way about kbin and getting a feed of those I follow and dismissed it as having a bad UI, now I realise that I was under a false impression.
You could make a report here suggesting an enhancement.
But what comes into the feed is anything posted on kbin as a microblog (potentially by mistake) or, from mastadon where they tagged a community subscribed to.
It isn't normal threads to groups that end up there.
Just looking at the current feed on my instance (you can see yourself, you don't need to login https://kbin.life/microblog) the first item is from a mastadon user that tagged the [email protected] group. Hence why it shows up there since the instance takes content from there.
The next 2 items are clearly people on kbin.social that mistakenly (well maybe deliberately, but I suspect not) create a post, not a thread in the [email protected] group.
You can tell which is which, the mastadon users are deliberately using hashtags and tagging groups with @. The others are making a very reddit style post that is turning up in the wrong place because they chose post, not thread.
But I think it'd be a nice option to just show followed people and not groups. Maybe a three way toggle. People, Groups, All.
Thanks! It’s an interesting point you make about the user mistakes. Names are annoyingly important huh!
I’m on kbin.social, and the microblog page there just now seems to show posts from mastodon accounts that aren’t using hashtags or tagging a community: kbin.social/microblog
OK then I can see what's happening and there needs to be filtering added (and not just by magazine as it allows now).
I think it's putting into random microblog posts by anyone that any user followed. In fact, you can confirm it easily by scrolling down on my one while not logged in. I mentioned I only followed elonjet. And sure enough there's some posts by elonjet a bit further down, but otherwise it's just mastadon users tagging groups or kbin users making a mistake.
Simply merging the two feeds doesn’t make sense. But there are, I’d say, more than one level of integration, all of which are useful.
Single app that allows you to sign in to both platforms with two accounts. Both platforms are presented in separate views, but you only have one app that also manages all of the peripheral preferences like theme, notifications etc.
Single app that partially fuses the two platforms without simply providing two completely different views.
EG … all feeds of communities/magazines can be listed under “groups”, all users under “people”, and all notifications from both platforms (including “DMs”) under one list/feed
Some special aggregation service that you only need to create one account for but that provides you access to multiple platforms with proxy accounts. IF such a thing were to exist, there’d probably a whole range of possible hacks .
It’s so easy nowadays to slap some bootstrap and Angular together to build a web frontend. It will work on every device if you don’t do crazy cutting-edge shit. I cannot comprehend why companies dig native apps so much.
With a native app, the only thing you really need to send back and forth is some JSON data and let the app do the formatting for you. It's a much better arrangement when your target demographic includes those with bad internet.
How is that any different from a web site? There are multiple caches between the browser and the server. The initial load (assuming a prior visit and no updates since) may be smaller than 1kB.
you can do that with a browser too. with service workers, it can also run without an internet connection and/or indefinitely cache the ui part so that it’s also just a json api. most websites already work in a very similar way, and even if it’s not intentionally set up this way, your browser will do its best to make it like this to keep your user experience snappy.
your browser just also protects you from certain level of system access that shouldn’t be granted to any random website you visit, and that’s what these apps want.
^ this. your browser is a user agent, it’s working for you, to protect you from any schmuck who you have the misfortune of visiting. it has strict built-in privacy and security guarantees, which, while in no way interfere with the app’s primary functionality, do interfere in their marketing bullshit and other kinds of spying.
with apps, you have none of that protective layer, instead there is a certain degree of implied trust which these parties love to abuse.
Yeah, it sucks because you can do really cool stuff with web apps these days but no, instead I need 140 native apps for basically every mobile service because their mobile websites are abhorrently designed and basically only exist to point you towards the app.
Oh, I’m fully aware. That’s honestly the kicker, they could host those apps on the web and have me be able to access everything through my browser, but no, instead I have to install their stupid apps just so they can harvest my data.
Two different types of software - Lemmy is a link aggregator like reddit, Mastodon is a microblogging service like twitter.
But, underpinning each of them (and various other types of software too) is something called ActivityPub. This is a protocol - i.e. its a method of passing information from one place to another. Just like SMTP is a protocol for passing emails and FTP is a protocol for transferring files.
So just like GMail uses SMTP to send/receive email, so does Hotmail or Yahoo etc etc. And just as Lemmy uses ActivityPub, so does Mastodon.
What this means - in theory - is that content can travel between any piece of software that is underpinned by ActivityPub. And in fact, this already happens. Mastodon users see Lemmy communities (e.g. c/fediverse) as just another user. So they can follow Communities and Post to them. Lemmy can’t do that at the moment because it is nowhere near as mature a product as Mastodon.
The other issue (as has already been mentioned) is that Lemmy and Mastodon (and PixelFed, PeerTube etc) all have different types of content. Lemmy content usually has a much greater word count per post for example. It’s like posting a WordPress blog post to Twitter.
These issues will get resolved with time, the Fediverse itself is relatively new. Lemmy is very new.
Thank you and @samokosik for the explanation. I understand that the underlying communication protocol is the same; what’s not clear to me yet is how I can follow communities from Mastodon or post from there – but of course there are good tutorials out there, just haven’t found the time to go through them yet.
What I don’t get at the moment is how a Lemmy community would look like on Mastodon. Maybe like a hashtag-topic? I agree with others here that the context and way of interacting within a (Lemmy) community is quite different from those of Mastodon exchanges. So I suppose I would be quite confused seeing the two together. Or maybe not – I haven’t checked this, so there’s half a prejudice on my part there.
What I don’t get at the moment is how a Lemmy community would look like on Mastodon.
I speak under correction here but I believe if a Mastodon user follows a Lemmy Community, the titles of new posts to that Community show in their Mastodon timeline.
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