Hello,
some people have told me that it is possible to see lemmy posts from mastodon. To me it makes a lot of sense to have a single app for whole fediverse. However, mastodon is not doing a good job at this.
Each time I look at my mastodon home feed, it is spammed with completely random posts from lemmy which do not even show up in the organised view wefwef/memmy provide. Is there any way how to take care of this?
For lemmy I have found wefwef and memmy to be actually quite good. Interface is simple and easy to use, posts look organised. On mastodon it just feels far worse, especially with lemmy connected.
Are there any alternatives to the official mastodon app that would allow better integration with lemmy? To me it seems logical to have a single app for both platforms as they use the same principle.
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.
Simply merging the two feeds doesn't make sense. But there are, I'd say, more than one level of integration, all of which are useful.
Single app that allows you to sign in to both platforms with two accounts. Both platforms are presented in separate views, but you only have one app that also manages all of the peripheral preferences like theme, notifications etc.
Single app that partially fuses the two platforms without simply providing two completely different views.
EG ... all feeds of communities/magazines can be listed under "groups", all users under "people", and all notifications from both platforms (including "DMs") under one list/feed
Some special aggregation service that you only need to create one account for but that provides you access to multiple platforms with proxy accounts. IF such a thing were to exist, there'd probably a whole range of possible hacks .
Kbin is a Lemmy clone that has a mastodon client built in. It uses slightly different terminology (e.g. magazines instead of communities) but is otherwise functionally the same.
The reason this doesn't work so well is that Lemmy communities are ActivityPub groups, which is not a feature the Mastodon has really implemented - right now you just follow the group as a user and it boosts all the posts to you.
However, Mastodon plans to do groups in their next major update, and this will most likely make the integration much nicer.
Two different types of software - Lemmy is a link aggregator like reddit, Mastodon is a microblogging service like twitter.
But, underpinning each of them (and various other types of software too) is something called ActivityPub. This is a protocol - i.e. its a method of passing information from one place to another. Just like SMTP is a protocol for passing emails and FTP is a protocol for transferring files.
So just like GMail uses SMTP to send/receive email, so does Hotmail or Yahoo etc etc. And just as Lemmy uses ActivityPub, so does Mastodon.
What this means - in theory - is that content can travel between any piece of software that is underpinned by ActivityPub. And in fact, this already happens. Mastodon users see Lemmy communities (e.g. c/fediverse) as just another user. So they can follow Communities and Post to them. Lemmy can't do that at the moment because it is nowhere near as mature a product as Mastodon.
The other issue (as has already been mentioned) is that Lemmy and Mastodon (and PixelFed, PeerTube etc) all have different types of content. Lemmy content usually has a much greater word count per post for example. It's like posting a WordPress blog post to Twitter.
These issues will get resolved with time, the Fediverse itself is relatively new. Lemmy is very new.
Thank you and @samokosik@lemmy.world for the explanation. I understand that the underlying communication protocol is the same; what's not clear to me yet is how I can follow communities from Mastodon or post from there – but of course there are good tutorials out there, just haven't found the time to go through them yet.
What I don't get at the moment is how a Lemmy community would look like on Mastodon. Maybe like a hashtag-topic? I agree with others here that the context and way of interacting within a (Lemmy) community is quite different from those of Mastodon exchanges. So I suppose I would be quite confused seeing the two together. Or maybe not – I haven't checked this, so there's half a prejudice on my part there.
kbin is what you're talking about. It combines Mastodon with Lemmy in its own software and I can interact with both. Additionally it's not maintained and run by tankies.