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Kind of. My observed behavior of Lemmy, combined with comments from some developers (I haven’t read the code):
Post goes up on community hosted on instance A, Message goes out to B and C: “here’s a new post”
User x@B comments on post. Message goes from B to A saying “here’s a new comment”. A adds the comment, then sends a message to C “here’s a new comment”
User y@C upvotes the comment. Message goes from C to A, then A sends a message to C.
Each of those messages are confirmed by the recipient, and there are timed retries. However, there have been plenty of cases where one of those messages get lost, and the communities get out of sync. As I understand it, the message traffic is only changes. They don’t talk to each other to see what the current state of the content is. So whenever a sync break happens, it is permanent. New content/changes are fine, but stuff that gets lost in transit is lost for good.
I’m not sure ActivityPub is suitable for implementation of Lemmy/Kbin. ActivityPub seems to be a push (with retry) protocol, where if a message gets lost, the protocol doesn’t seem to have a means to recover synchronization. Theoretically, instances could verify synchronization on a periodic basis, but that would be a massive increase in traffic.
Lemmy isn’t really targeting that space, though Reddit had a feature that they could add here that would work hit some of your feature points: there was a user page that was like a sub owned by each user. In the meantime you could create a community and make it mod only posts, and that would be pretty much the same thing. Just no hashtags.
Mastodon does (by default) have a post length limit of 500 characters, but in all other ways it sounds like a better fit for what you want.
And you can write an app that will lie about the address of someone posting on ActivityPub. What’s your point?
Mine is that you log in to your e-mail provider to access the content you are interested in. You don’t go logging in to other e-mail providers because that is where the people creating the content are.
Choosing different communities with the stated purpose is all about context: the policies of the mods, the policies of the admins, and the reputation of the instance. Yes, it isn’t a perfect analogy, but people need to shift how the think about the Lemmy/Kbin model from how they think about Reddit, and the example that seems to connect most easily with users is e-mail. Maybe a more subtle / apt analogy would be [email protected] has an obviously different context and significantly different content than [email protected], but the same stated purpose (and community name).
The problem is that it isn’t just the users who are confused about this: Lemmy admins seem to each have the goal of being “the place to be”, and Kbin goes out of its way to devalue off-instance content. I personally think (primarily) user instances should be separate from (primarily) content instances, but that would take a coordinated effort by the admins. We are starting to see some grass roots efforts at making that happen, though the actions of the admins may prevent that from taking hold.
If I send an email to [email protected], it should be copied to [email protected] because it is the same thing, right?
Lemmy isn’t Reddit. It has similar capabilities, but it is fundamentally different. Think email or web hosting, not one stop shop.
Be aware that most of what you see as happiness and comfort is actually just performative - they see that everyone around them is “happy” and their minister tells them if they follow the rules they will be happy. So they don’t want anyone to know how imperfect their lives are, so they pretend they are happy, and say all the right words and jump through all the right hoops.
Then you dig deeper and find that all their kids had kids out of wedlock, one is being abused by their spouse and is cheating on them, one disavowed any responsibility for their second kid they had with a second person who they weren’t married to…
You get the idea.
It isn’t all a front. The truth is that some religious communities do provide community to people who otherwise would be alone. But they are just groups of people with a shared hobby, not some kind of magic.
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.
In the US, there is a consumer magazine Consumer Reports. This magazine is published by a non-profit who takes no advertising dollars and pays full price for anything they review so as to avoid any appearance of bias. Every year, CR sends out a survey to all of its members (8 million+) about the cars that they own, asking specific questions about problems & repairs their cars have had over the last year. They aggregate this data and present it as reliability ratings. In the past, Japanese cars have had overwhelmingly better reliability ratings than US cars. I recall in the late 90s / early 00s US cars rarely did better than the middle value of their 5 bubble scale for overall reliability, while Japanese cars almost always got the top value. (German cars also rated highly for reliability as well, but are much more expensive in the US than Japanese imports)
The difference may no longer be as large or uniform, but this is certainly where the generalized view came from.
Yeah, I gather that you can follow a Lemmy thread using mastodon, if awkwardly. I figure it would be what doing it from Threads would be like - definitely not something the average threads user will be interested in. I think the conversation would be more about Threads being a fair player and not making Mastadon a second class citizen, but there is already a planned feature to limit interaction with federated users:
Another unique aspect of Threads that many have been anticipating is the way it can connect to federated social networks like Mastodon (collectively known as the “fediverse”). It seems that Threads may not be ready to launch its fediverse features right away.
Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon. They can also find you with your full username @[email protected].
The only other detail we could uncover about Threads’ integration with the fediverse is that if you choose to restrict replies on a post, it won’t be shared outside of the Threads app.
When you limit replies, your thread will not be shared with your fediverse followers.
I don’t get the privacy argument against federation with corporate instances. No corporation gets access to any more information when federated than they can get from the API with a simple login. Our privacy protection comes from logging in to instances other than those controlled by corporate interests, not by avoiding sharing our content with them (which we cannot avoid).
Even at the most basic level it is broken - at the bottom of your comment is a “context” button with the fediverse symbol. If I click on it, it won’t take me to the comment on my instance (lemmy.world) but instead is an absolute link to the comment on your instance (Aussie.world) even though the community lives on lemmy.world.
I love lemmy, and I think it has a bright future, but this fundamental problem really needs to be fixed.
It is really clear until a newb tries to use it:
- Someone gives you a link, or you find it in search
- You click on the link, because that’s what you do with links
- It takes you to what you are looking for, but it says you have to log in to comment or vote
- You log in so you can comment or vote
The UX for interacting with off-instance subs is abysmal. What is even worse is that as far as I can tell, there is no way to link a post or comment that is instance relative / instance independent.
shrug I’m just speaking of my experience. I’ve been able to access the communities I’m interested in on multiple lemmy instances, but I’ve had zero luck on Kbin. Frankly, the “connect to remote community” UX for both lemmy and Kbin is complete crap, and is likely the #1 turnoff for new users. I’m very disappointed that neither have chosen to fix it.
I see little difference beyond the ability to microblog on Kbin. I think it was unnecessary to rename communities, and causes confusion. I still keep an eye on my kbin.social and fedia.io logins, but I just can’t access content I can find from multiple lemmy instances. I was also swayed away from Kbin by an admin who was running it but ultimately gave up on it and switched to lemmy because Kbin is unstable. (I’ll update this comment with a link if I can find it)
Listen and be supportive. If you feel the need to solve, of think they are looking for a solution, ask. “Are you venting or looking for advice?”
It is really important to ask before offering advice/solutions, because doing so can make someone feel like you are trivializing their problem, or that they can’t solve it themselves.
Interesting - TIL. I wonder how Lemmy resolves the post #, since it is different between instances, and if it re-syncs comments when you do that. The post # thing is annoying, btw, because it makes it impossible to use relative links in posts/comments.