7 ms·

Using Lemmy from my existing Mastodon

75 points by favourable 3y ago

tetrisgm 3y ago
Didn't realize Lemmy uses ActivityPub too. Does it make sense to subscribe to a Lemmy thread in Mastodon? Or use it to DM a Lemmy user? Is there a concept of shared message inbox or such?
- dvngnt_ 3y ago
  not really. you can create posts from mastodon but following people and groups needs work
  - tetrisgm 3y ago
    How so? I assumed all AP posts would work across
- ajayyy 3y ago
  One cool side-effect is that existing mastodon bots (like remind bots) work seamlessly. Just ping them as normal and they will reply.
- rglullis 3y ago
  I just tried sending DM from Mastodon account to my Lemmy one, it didn't work.
  - tetrisgm 3y ago
    That's really odd. Why would it not
senkora 3y ago
Lemmy has been able to mostly replace Reddit for me. It’s much smaller right now but in my experience I do find enough interesting things there to hold my attention. I would love better integration between Lemmy and Mastodon so that I can consume Mastodon content as well. For those looking on from the sidelines, the Fediverse is much realer than any other alternative social network I’ve ever looked into. It has rough edges vis-a-vis posting but Lemmy is very usable for passive viewers / commenters and I would 100% recommend it to anyone sophisticated enough to have used a third-party reddit app, especially with the Voyager for Lemmy PWA.
- croutonwagon 3y ago
  Would agree. I am VERY torn on Lemmy. Its functional, I even run my own instance. But the distaste from the creators jamming of their politics into it, and much of the politics on there, make it really hard to promote or support.
  - internetter 3y ago
    > But the distaste from the creators jamming of their politics into i I don't understand. Are you saying the developers aren't allowed to have public political views? Their instance – lemmy.ml, doesn't even accept signups. I disagree with their views, but I don't see where the politics are being jammed in (actually, the only place I've seen it so far is people complaining about their politics)...
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      The main thing I see is lemmygrad.ml alts posting stuff, but agreed, nothing from the creators. Afaik lemmy.ml is even defederated from their lemmygrad instance
    - bluGill 3y ago
      It always brings some distaste to use things by those I disagree with. Some disagreements are minor and as a liberal (in the classical sense, not the so called liberal political party which have nothing to do with term) I can accept them as disagreement of opinion is good. However some are very dangerous - any support, even the most indirect supports things that are against my interests and can destroy the very tolerance I want. Thus while I want to support people's right to say racist things, people actually saying such things makes the world worse. The creators of Lemmy have crossed the line - their stated beliefs are so opposed to mine that any support they get for their ideas - even the ones that seem harmless - I have to oppose as well lest they get more traction on their awful ideas by proxy in some way.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        That is such a weak argument. No, using a software made by someone you don't agree with does not require you to subscribe to their ideology. It is not indicative of support of any kind. It's getting tiring this extreme concern about being "guilty by association". Yeah, the Lemmy devs can make good, useful software. Yes, the Lemmy devs are idiots. The same thing can be said about Richard Stallman and Emacs. I can hold more than two opinions about a person, and I can tell when someone deserves credit or not.
NoboruWataya 3y ago
I have been using Lemmy for a few weeks now. I was sceptical before I signed up but I have to say I generally enjoy it a lot and it is a good replacement for Reddit for the most part. I am mostly using it to follow communities related to tech-related things like programming, FOSS, selfhosting, etc. Positives: - The communities I frequent are surprisingly active, with plenty of links being posted and a good pace of discussion. Lots of non-Lemmy-related content as well which is great. - Discussion is generally of a pretty high standard so far. - The tankie stuff seems pretty self-contained, or at least, has not spread to the communities I follow. - The platform itself is developing at a very quick pace. At first both the web UI and the app I use (Jerboa) were very buggy but there are new updates every few days and each one fixes a lot of issues. Some negatives: - Stability of instances has been an issue. Early on, one of the largest instances (BeeHaw) defederated from two others, meaning that users on any three of the instances would be cut off from a lot of content. So I went with one called VLemmy.net. All went well for a week or two until VLemmy completely disappeared of the face of the internet one night. To this day it's not back up and no one really knows what happened to it. Around the same time, an XSS exploit was found that affected a number of major instances, causing some of them to go down temporarily. All of this is just growing pains but it felt fairly chaotic for a bit. - Whenever I look at the "All" listing rather than just my subscribed communities, it's like 90% memes, which I don't love. Maybe Reddit was like that too and I just never went to /r/all. - A lot of non-technical communities I followed on Reddit don't seem to have established over there yet or are very small and inactive. All in all I'm pleasantly surprised with Lemmy. I still visit Reddit occasionally but my usage of it has dropped significantly and honestly over time I can see myself leaving it altogether.
- flutas 3y ago
  > - Whenever I look at the "All" listing rather than just my subscribed communities, it's like 90% memes, which I don't love. Maybe Reddit was like that too and I just never went to /r/all. This is kinda by design, one popular community can outweigh hundreds of others, but there's a PR open to fix it. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378
- rglullis 3y ago
seanalltogether 3y ago
I noticed someone posted on Lemmy the other day how easy vote manipulation is. I wonder if the reddit style model is sustainable on federated platforms.
- rglullis 3y ago
  The "manipulation" only exists now because the vote-counting algorithms are rudimentary, but unlike reddit, they are completely transparent. Every upvote/downvote is registered in the instance and relayed to the instances. This means that we can have, e.g, vote-ranking algorithms that are a lot smarter: we can have votes that boost everything vote by someone N-degrees of your friend network, or de-boosted if a upvoting ring is detected, or ignored if the account is less than X days old, etc.
  - mariusor 3y ago
    To add to that, the ActivityPub protocol or the ActivityStreams vocabulary says nothing about limiting the amount of times an account can Like/Dislike a comment or submission.
CaptainFever 3y ago
Is there a Lemmy (or AP groups) to NNTP bridge existing nowadays? I really like some of the communities I see on there, and I’d like to subscribe and post to them from Thunderbird.
rcarmo 3y ago
I tried this for a while on my personal server and had to stop following Lemmy communities because the load was just too much (ActivityPub is just too chatty).

75 points by favourable 3y ago

Didn't realize Lemmy uses ActivityPub too. Does it make sense to subscribe to a Lemmy thread in Mastodon? Or use it to DM a Lemmy user? Is there a concept of shared message inbox or such?

dvngnt_ 3y ago
not really. you can create posts from mastodon but following people and groups needs work
- tetrisgm 3y ago
  How so? I assumed all AP posts would work across
ajayyy 3y ago
One cool side-effect is that existing mastodon bots (like remind bots) work seamlessly. Just ping them as normal and they will reply.
rglullis 3y ago
I just tried sending DM from Mastodon account to my Lemmy one, it didn't work.
- tetrisgm 3y ago
  That's really odd. Why would it not

senkora 3y ago

Lemmy has been able to mostly replace Reddit for me. It’s much smaller right now but in my experience I do find enough interesting things there to hold my attention. I would love better integration between Lemmy and Mastodon so that I can consume Mastodon content as well. For those looking on from the sidelines, the Fediverse is much realer than any other alternative social network I’ve ever looked into. It has rough edges vis-a-vis posting but Lemmy is very usable for passive viewers / commenters and I would 100% recommend it to anyone sophisticated enough to have used a third-party reddit app, especially with the Voyager for Lemmy PWA.

croutonwagon 3y ago
Would agree. I am VERY torn on Lemmy. Its functional, I even run my own instance. But the distaste from the creators jamming of their politics into it, and much of the politics on there, make it really hard to promote or support.
- internetter 3y ago
  > But the distaste from the creators jamming of their politics into i I don't understand. Are you saying the developers aren't allowed to have public political views? Their instance – lemmy.ml, doesn't even accept signups. I disagree with their views, but I don't see where the politics are being jammed in (actually, the only place I've seen it so far is people complaining about their politics)...
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    The main thing I see is lemmygrad.ml alts posting stuff, but agreed, nothing from the creators. Afaik lemmy.ml is even defederated from their lemmygrad instance
  - bluGill 3y ago
    It always brings some distaste to use things by those I disagree with. Some disagreements are minor and as a liberal (in the classical sense, not the so called liberal political party which have nothing to do with term) I can accept them as disagreement of opinion is good. However some are very dangerous - any support, even the most indirect supports things that are against my interests and can destroy the very tolerance I want. Thus while I want to support people's right to say racist things, people actually saying such things makes the world worse. The creators of Lemmy have crossed the line - their stated beliefs are so opposed to mine that any support they get for their ideas - even the ones that seem harmless - I have to oppose as well lest they get more traction on their awful ideas by proxy in some way.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      That is such a weak argument. No, using a software made by someone you don't agree with does not require you to subscribe to their ideology. It is not indicative of support of any kind. It's getting tiring this extreme concern about being "guilty by association". Yeah, the Lemmy devs can make good, useful software. Yes, the Lemmy devs are idiots. The same thing can be said about Richard Stallman and Emacs. I can hold more than two opinions about a person, and I can tell when someone deserves credit or not.

NoboruWataya 3y ago

I have been using Lemmy for a few weeks now. I was sceptical before I signed up but I have to say I generally enjoy it a lot and it is a good replacement for Reddit for the most part. I am mostly using it to follow communities related to tech-related things like programming, FOSS, selfhosting, etc. Positives: - The communities I frequent are surprisingly active, with plenty of links being posted and a good pace of discussion. Lots of non-Lemmy-related content as well which is great. - Discussion is generally of a pretty high standard so far. - The tankie stuff seems pretty self-contained, or at least, has not spread to the communities I follow. - The platform itself is developing at a very quick pace. At first both the web UI and the app I use (Jerboa) were very buggy but there are new updates every few days and each one fixes a lot of issues. Some negatives: - Stability of instances has been an issue. Early on, one of the largest instances (BeeHaw) defederated from two others, meaning that users on any three of the instances would be cut off from a lot of content. So I went with one called VLemmy.net. All went well for a week or two until VLemmy completely disappeared of the face of the internet one night. To this day it's not back up and no one really knows what happened to it. Around the same time, an XSS exploit was found that affected a number of major instances, causing some of them to go down temporarily. All of this is just growing pains but it felt fairly chaotic for a bit. - Whenever I look at the "All" listing rather than just my subscribed communities, it's like 90% memes, which I don't love. Maybe Reddit was like that too and I just never went to /r/all. - A lot of non-technical communities I followed on Reddit don't seem to have established over there yet or are very small and inactive. All in all I'm pleasantly surprised with Lemmy. I still visit Reddit occasionally but my usage of it has dropped significantly and honestly over time I can see myself leaving it altogether.

flutas 3y ago
> - Whenever I look at the "All" listing rather than just my subscribed communities, it's like 90% memes, which I don't love. Maybe Reddit was like that too and I just never went to /r/all. This is kinda by design, one popular community can outweigh hundreds of others, but there's a PR open to fix it. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378
rglullis 3y ago

seanalltogether 3y ago

I noticed someone posted on Lemmy the other day how easy vote manipulation is. I wonder if the reddit style model is sustainable on federated platforms.

rglullis 3y ago
The "manipulation" only exists now because the vote-counting algorithms are rudimentary, but unlike reddit, they are completely transparent. Every upvote/downvote is registered in the instance and relayed to the instances. This means that we can have, e.g, vote-ranking algorithms that are a lot smarter: we can have votes that boost everything vote by someone N-degrees of your friend network, or de-boosted if a upvoting ring is detected, or ignored if the account is less than X days old, etc.
- mariusor 3y ago
  To add to that, the ActivityPub protocol or the ActivityStreams vocabulary says nothing about limiting the amount of times an account can Like/Dislike a comment or submission.

CaptainFever 3y ago

Is there a Lemmy (or AP groups) to NNTP bridge existing nowadays? I really like some of the communities I see on there, and I’d like to subscribe and post to them from Thunderbird.

rcarmo 3y ago

I tried this for a while on my personal server and had to stop following Lemmy communities because the load was just too much (ActivityPub is just too chatty).