Unexpected comment behaviour between Mastodon and Lemmy

Oliver Lowe · 11 months ago

Unexpected comment behaviour between Mastodon and Lemmy

gregorum · edit-2 11 months ago

I’m kind of curious: why do people like using Lemmy via Mastodon? I’ve taken a look at it, and it seems kind of inconvenient.

I’m not judging, I’m just curious.

Oliver Lowe · 11 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.

gregorum · edit-2 11 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.ee · 10 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.

Rimu · 11 months ago

While both Lemmy and Mastodon use ActivityPub, the way they send ActivityPub messages to each other differs quite a bit. There is not a simple or quick solution to this. However recently I read about Lemmy having improved integration with https://a.gup.pe/, a service that adds Groups support to Mastodon so that might be something you want to try out.

Mastodon having so many users makes it a tempting target for integration but federation with software that uses Groups properly (e.g. PeerTube, Friendica) is likely to be easier to achieve.

Oliver Lowe · 11 months ago

Gotcha. I had a feeling something around how Mastodon doesn’t support ActivityPub Groups (yet?) would be where things are going on. Congrats on piefed, by the way. I’ll start studying the codebase now as I’m keen to understand how server-to-server communication works more deeply than I do now. Sending Announce(?) and fetching stuff from other servers…

When I look at the ActivityPub Note object (via curl -H 'Accept: application/activity+json https://hachyderm.io/@otl/111887721960075860) I see:

{
    "@context": [
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
        {
            "ostatus": "http://ostatus.org#",
            "atomUri": "ostatus:atomUri",
            "inReplyToAtomUri": "ostatus:inReplyToAtomUri",
            "conversation": "ostatus:conversation",
            "sensitive": "as:sensitive",
            "toot": "http://joinmastodon.org/ns#",
            "votersCount": "toot:votersCount"
        }
    ],
    "id": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860",
    "type": "Note",
    "summary": null,
    "inReplyTo": "https://ttrpg.network/comment/4965852",
    "published": "2024-02-07T01:59:08Z",
    "url": "https://hachyderm.io/@otl/111887721960075860",
    "attributedTo": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl",
    "to": [
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
    ],
    "cc": [
        "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/followers",
        "https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato",
        "https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux"
    ],
    "sensitive": false,
    "atomUri": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860",
    "inReplyToAtomUri": "https://ttrpg.network/comment/4965852",
    "conversation": "tag:hachyderm.io,2024-02-06:objectId=123754186:objectType=Conversation",
    "content": "<p><span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>Neato</span></a></span> <span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>ForgottenFlux</span></a></span>  I totally get how you feel. One use-case I think of is machine-generated image alt-text. These are often not added to images. But with image-to-text ML models, visually-impaired people could hear a descriptions of images that before were never annotated.</p>",
    "contentMap": {
        "en": "<p><span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>Neato</span></a></span> <span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>ForgottenFlux</span></a></span>  I totally get how you feel. One use-case I think of is machine-generated image alt-text. These are often not added to images. But with image-to-text ML models, visually-impaired people could hear a descriptions of images that before were never annotated.</p>"
    },
    "attachment": [],
    "tag": [
        {
            "type": "Mention",
            "href": "https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato",
            "name": "@Neato@ttrpg.network"
        },
        {
            "type": "Mention",
            "href": "https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux",
            "name": "@ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world"
        }
    ],
    "replies": {
        "id": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies",
        "type": "Collection",
        "first": {
            "type": "CollectionPage",
            "next": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies?only_other_accounts=true&page=true",
            "partOf": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies",
            "items": []
        }
    }
}

So I’m assuming an Announce was posted to the shared inboxes at lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and ttrpg.network… hmm… I better start reading!

T Jedi · 11 months ago

One way to ensure your comment to federate the way you are expecting is to mention the original group (community) of the thread. This way, Lemmy will receive the comment on the group’s inbox and propagate to all federated servers.

Another behavior I found is that replies to non federated comments (as the one you showed in the op) will be announced to all federated servers. More details I found here: https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/understanding-activitypub-part-2-lemmy/

Oliver Lowe · 11 months ago

Ah ha makes sense now! The “Replying to comments” section of that article explains exactly what’s happening. If I understand correctly the community itself (!privacy@lemmy.ml in my above example) is not notified of my reply from Mastodon. If the community did know, then it would broadcast a notification of the activity to whoever else is subscribed to !privacy@lemmy.ml.

@can@sh.itjust.works · 11 months ago

I think the instances would already need to be federated?

Oliver Lowe · 11 months ago

Ah! Interesting.

Which instances? Do you mean hachyderm.io with, say, lemmy.one?

@can@sh.itjust.works · 11 months ago

Your home instance I believe.

mozz · 11 months ago

Federation in general seems like it’s been flaky as hell ever since a month or two ago… my guess (especially if you see it on some Lemmy servers and not others) is that it’s delayed and will show up eventually.

It’s possible that there’s some unexpected behavior that leads it to federate some places and not others, but my expectation is that once your comment is on lemmy.ml’s server, it’s federation delay between the Lemmy servers and nothing to do with you specifically.