Asklemmy

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I am new to the Fediverse. I vaguely understand how Lemmy instances broadcast content to each other, but I was surprised to find Lemmy communities on kbin. How does that work? (feddit.uk)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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. :-)

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

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.

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

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.

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

What is really cool is that you can mix and match features, like if you follow a Mastodon user on Misskey and vice versa, the Mastodon user can see the Misskey users full 5000 character post, even though Mastodon is limited to 500 chars.

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

Wanna try something crazy? Go to a mastodon instance like this one and put @[email protected] on the searchbar there.

or do the inverse, look for someone local to mastodon, like @[email protected] 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.

edit: I say this because sometimes I tried searching for something/someone specific on another domain and nothing came up :S