The fediverse is as if you took X, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook and made them all interoperable so you could post anything from anywhere, and all your followers would be guaranteed to see it.
I think the one thing that still confuses people is the concept of instances with platforms like Lemmy and Masto. It’s like there are multiple Reddits and Multiple Twitters, and what differentiates them confuses newbies.
What I don’t understand is why I only see Lemmy content when browsing through Sync. If Mastodon is connected to the fediverse, how do I find that content?
Also, as far as I can tell, most of the fediverse is basically more like Reddit than anything else.
ATM, you can’t. Normal mastodon posts are not understood by lemmy servers. They don’t know how to handle content that is not associated with a community.
Most of the fediverse is like twitter. Users making posts to their own “microblogs”/profiles, following each other or browsing a timeline of all posts by everyone. That’s mastodon, and it has by far the most activity.
Lemmy doesn’t support profile posts, and you can’t follow users, only communities.
Basically, all content on Lemmy is posted to groups, while all content on Mastodon is posted to the users own profiles. While the networks are technically connected, the content type is not compatible.
I hear mastodon is getting support for groups, though, which might be something that can be interoperable with lemmy communities. Then they could look at communities as if they were user groups, and post to them, and we could sub to mastodon user groups, and see their posts and feeds as if they were communities.
But until Lemmy implements support for “user” posts and “user” following, we won’t see the majority of content of that type, coming from mastodon.
There’s already some funky interoperability that comes from the underlying structure of communities kind of being user accounts, where mastodon users can follow Lemmy communities, and post to communities by mentioning them. But it’s not pretty.
To be clear, the Fediverse doesn’t mean that everything is interconnected. It means that everything can be interconnected, but most sites will only do a very minimal form of interconnectivity. And that’s mainly due to personal choice. You wouldn’t want to have Instagram posts on your Reddit feed, and you wouldn’t want Tumblr posts on YouTube. You can do that, but why would you?
So most sites will only interconnect with other sites that they deem to be similar enough in content style. Lemmy interconnects with Kbin because both are Reddit clones. Kbin interconnects with Lemmy, but it also interconnects with Mastodon. Apparently the developer of Kbin thought that Mastodon is similar enough in content style that people would appreciate having Mastodon posts appear on Kbin. And this happens for all the other sites. The Fediverse is less like a tightly connected network, and more like a loose connection of sites that could operate together, if they ever chose to do so. Like a federation, if you will
Basically, if you’re on Lemmy (which you are), you’re only going to see Reddit-like content
I think the one thing that still confuses people is the concept of instances with platforms like Lemmy and Masto. It’s like there are multiple Reddits and Multiple Twitters, and what differentiates them confuses newbies.
What I don’t understand is why I only see Lemmy content when browsing through Sync. If Mastodon is connected to the fediverse, how do I find that content?
Also, as far as I can tell, most of the fediverse is basically more like Reddit than anything else.
ATM, you can’t. Normal mastodon posts are not understood by lemmy servers. They don’t know how to handle content that is not associated with a community.
Most of the fediverse is like twitter. Users making posts to their own “microblogs”/profiles, following each other or browsing a timeline of all posts by everyone. That’s mastodon, and it has by far the most activity.
Lemmy doesn’t support profile posts, and you can’t follow users, only communities.
Basically, all content on Lemmy is posted to groups, while all content on Mastodon is posted to the users own profiles. While the networks are technically connected, the content type is not compatible.
I hear mastodon is getting support for groups, though, which might be something that can be interoperable with lemmy communities. Then they could look at communities as if they were user groups, and post to them, and we could sub to mastodon user groups, and see their posts and feeds as if they were communities.
But until Lemmy implements support for “user” posts and “user” following, we won’t see the majority of content of that type, coming from mastodon.
There’s already some funky interoperability that comes from the underlying structure of communities kind of being user accounts, where mastodon users can follow Lemmy communities, and post to communities by mentioning them. But it’s not pretty.
To be clear, the Fediverse doesn’t mean that everything is interconnected. It means that everything can be interconnected, but most sites will only do a very minimal form of interconnectivity. And that’s mainly due to personal choice. You wouldn’t want to have Instagram posts on your Reddit feed, and you wouldn’t want Tumblr posts on YouTube. You can do that, but why would you?
So most sites will only interconnect with other sites that they deem to be similar enough in content style. Lemmy interconnects with Kbin because both are Reddit clones. Kbin interconnects with Lemmy, but it also interconnects with Mastodon. Apparently the developer of Kbin thought that Mastodon is similar enough in content style that people would appreciate having Mastodon posts appear on Kbin. And this happens for all the other sites. The Fediverse is less like a tightly connected network, and more like a loose connection of sites that could operate together, if they ever chose to do so. Like a federation, if you will
Basically, if you’re on Lemmy (which you are), you’re only going to see Reddit-like content