My replies via Mastodon to Lemmy posts don’t get distributed as expected. For example:

It seems my reply only shows in these Lemmy servers:

  • lemmy.ml (the server of the group to which the post was made)
  • lemmy.world (the server of the post’s author)
  • ttrpg.network (the server of the comment’s author)

From some other lemmy servers, my comment is not present:

I expected that my reply would show on any other Lemmy server with subscriptions to !privacy@lemmy.ml. Does that make sense? I’m hoping to help troubleshoot federation like this as I’m super excited about ActivityPub and what it means for the internet! :)

  • Oliver LoweOPEnglish
    6•4 months ago

    Good question! Sorry if this answer is weird :)

    For me, I don’t actually interact from Mastodon per se. I wrote a couple of read-only Lemmy & Mastodon clients. One for a weird text editing environment I use (https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382) and via email (https://gts.olowe.co/@o/statuses/01HMQ9N4HQ2ETGZWJS49K5NG5Y). To reply to or create posts, I use a write-only Mastodon client I wrote.

    My idea is to exercise the fediverse. In principal I don’t think I should need separate accounts for Lemmy, PeerTube, Mastodon, Kbin, Akkoma, etc.

    Right now I’m replying from an account on lemmy.sdf.org as I can’t reply from GoToSocial (Lemmy and GoToSocial don’t work well together right now) and my Mastodon server (hachyderm.io) has a post limit of 500 characters.

    • gregorumEnglish
      6•4 months ago

      A. thank you for answering

      B. yes, your answer is “weird”, but not out of the realm of the fuck-aroundery I expect tinkerers to be doing on the backend.

      C. I’m more interested in why casual users might be doing this, although I think, perhaps, you might have partially answered my question: casual users might not be trying to do this much anymore. this may be mostly due to current technical and UX limitations. also, a lack of apps addressing tis or even understanding the tech or its potential.

      I think, when there was a bigger migration 6 or so months ago, people were interested in getting Mastodon and Lemmy feeds one place and interacting with them in one app, but, now, it’s mostly a hobbyist thing. Perhaps this will change in the future as tinkerers continue to tinker.

      I worked on the UX/UI of a currently-popular Lemmy app a while back, and if it becomes worthwhile, I might like to work on an app that fixes the two. That’s why I’m interested. If you care to share anything meaningful you’ve learned WRT what you’ve gleaned regarding the benefits of brining both into the same UI (both for yourself and what you think a typical user might gain from it), I’d like to hear it.

      • @thegiddystitcher@lemm.eeEnglish
        1•3 months ago

        Hey, bit late to this discussion (found it while searching for something) but since you seemed interested in a casual user’s pov:

        I’m a member of quite a few Lemmy communities that are really small, and I’m very active on Mastodon. So having those small communities in a list feed on Mastodon is really handy since I don’t miss anything and can just jump in with a reply on stuff without switching over to Lemmy.

        I also post a lot of the same type of stuff to both platforms and sometimes it makes sense to keep that separate, but sometimes with niche interests it’s nice to be able to cross-post and get both groups of people chatting together in the comments.

        Of course this is a moot point because federation between my Masto instance and Lemmy is currently broken, but it was really great before and I miss it a ton.