I apologize if there’s posts on this already. I’m still new here, and it’s very confusing.

I’ve read through the wikipedia entry, blogs, stack overflow posts, lemmy threads, etc… however in all of them, I feel like everyone glosses over how one goes about subscribing or even viewing content from other “packages”. For example, I have an account on lemmy.world, and am using the lemmy mobile app. I’d like to view / subscribe / participate in content from Misskey. Is this possible?

Everything I’ve read suggests it is, given that both lemmy and misskey leverage the same protocol, though I can’t figure out how that works.

  • FozzBear@lemmy.mumbled.xyz
    401·
    1 year ago

    Generally if you search for the full URL or handle of a profile or community your server should be able to find it. For example to find a user like mark ruffalo I just searched for @MarkRuffalo@mastodon.social on my lemmy instance. After a few tries it did find him but not his posts. I’ve only reliably gotten this searching to work through the main lemmy ui so your mileage may vary depending on the app you use. Misskey should work similarly I believe but I don’t follow or know of anyone on there so not sure

    • mikazuki@lemmy.world
      6·
      1 year ago

      I believe it just finds the user and not the post because the previous posts aren’t synced. So if you are the first user on your instance (eg lemmy.world) to look at that user, only the new posts that this user posts after you have subscribed are synced to the instance.

      • FozzBear@lemmy.mumbled.xyz
        2·
        1 year ago

        I don’t believe so, it looks like they use their own API. I would guess because they implement a subset of the subsonic API and it might be hard to juggle both. But there’s no harm in trying and seeing what happens.

      • SleepingTower@lemmy.worldOP
        2·
        1 year ago

        That’d be nice. I think this is what confused me - I made an account here, and expected to be able to use this account to interact with other packages like Funkwhale. However, it seems this is not the case. Each package requires you to create an account on their platform if you want to interact with their content within their app.

  • eh@nerdbin.social
    8·
    1 year ago

    Well, the “how” is technically simple. You paste the URL to the search box and you hit subscribe. You can do that right now with:

    • Lemmy communities
    • Kbin communities
    • PeerTube channels
    • Mayyyyybe a.gup.pe / chirp.social groups??? idk how well those would work

    Lemmy itself only let you subscribe to ActivityPub Group actors though, so it’s quite restrictive in that regard. kbin adds user follows and microblogging into the mix, but you can’t do those through Lemmy yet (or perhaps ever).

    However, the real “problem” is presentation. While you can, say, follow a Lemmy group from Mastodon. Mastodon is not intended for groups so it kinda breaks and ends up spamming your home timeline with all the posts and comments. Other implementations such as Akkoma or Misskey or Calckey (pending rename) might end up interacting better (because Mastodon will try to convert everything it gets into Notes in a “lossy” fashion).

    While the protocol does allow you the freedom to interact between services, you will not get the best experience if you’re not on a “similar enough” service. Although that does not stop you from following a PixelFed account from Misskey, or a Mastodon user accidentally finding their way into the Lemmy comments section. (You can tell because they’ll be the only comments that end up tagging people when replying)

  • Ducks@ducks.dev
    5·
    1 year ago

    Full disclosure I can be completely wrong, but this is my understanding.

    I don’t believe it is possible today to connect your Lemmy to Misskey. I may be wrong, but Lemmy at the moment supports kbin and lemmy. For example, Mastodon can read Lemmy, but Lemmy cannot read Mastodon. This is just a limitation of the way the app is programmed, even though the ActivityPub backend can communicate.

    • FozzBear@lemmy.mumbled.xyz
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I’m pretty sure they interpret the endpoints differently so unless a mastodon post is directly targeted at a community or something, lemmy just drops it. That’s why I still run a dedicated mastodon and lemmy instance. Kbin promises best of both worlds but doesn’t seem mature enough for my tastes.

      • Rooki@lemmy.worldM
        1·
        1 year ago

        It isnt posting it directly to the others instance api. Rather the Servers “Bot” requests the others API for updates and “scrapes” it like so

    • SleepingTower@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      I can see how the incompatibility can happen, despite the common protocols, each package serves a different purpose. For example, what should be shown when you subscribe to a video hosting service through a Lemmy instance? An aggregated list of thumbnails? A list of videos? What is a video hosting service to a link aggregator.

      Despite having a common protocol, it does seem impossible to have one app handling everything.

      Thank you for your reply.

      • Ducks@ducks.dev
        2·
        1 year ago

        There is one app I know of that is for generic ActivityPub activity, https://docs.microblog.pub/

        But as you said, in the more complex UIs like Lemmy, Mastodon, PeerTube, it would be a challenge to make the different forms of content fit the same structures. Micropub isn’t exactly nice to look at, but it is basic enough to be able to serve the different types of content… kinda

      • Drewfro66@lemmygrad.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        For example, what should be shown when you subscribe to a video hosting service through a Lemmy instance? An aggregated list of thumbnails? A list of videos? What is a video hosting service to a link aggregator.

        While I agree with the general premise, this is actually something a link aggregator would handle well. Translating, say, a YouTube video to a Reddit or Lemmy post is just title to title, video as the link, description as the text, replies as comments. Despite being shown very differently and used for different purposes, they’re about as similar on the backend as any two formats. Converting Tweets to Reddit posts and vice-versa is more difficult.

  • Rhaedas@kbin.social
    37·
    1 year ago

    It’s been compared to email. There are many different clients and ways to send and receive email, and they are all compatible with the core text. It’s not perfect, some places still don’t see others, but the concept is that everyone can share a base communication and connect to each other using different methods and styles.