I tried following a lemmy community in mastodon. It was super easy to follow a community just like a user. All posts were “boosted” by the community from the OPs to my feed. Great!
However my feed was immediately overwhelmed by a single lemmy community boosting not only the posts but every comment on all posts. My whole mastodon feed became an unordered list of lemmy comments.
Why are we implementing activitypub in this way? Shouldn’t communities boost the posts but leave comments as threads under the post? Does anyone know why lemmy works this way?
Also, would be lovely if every community had an “everything” user and a “hot” user. So like @technology@lemmy.ml and @technology_hot@lemmy.ml. It’s not a great experience to see literally every single post to a busy lemmy community in activitypub until they’ve gotten some upvotes.
PS - I am aware that integrating with mastodon is low priority, but if we’re going to use activitypub to share with non lemmy networks, we should be good citizens of it.
I think a lot of this comes down to an inherent problem with using the same protocol and objects to represent different things. In Lemmy users send a Create (of a post or comment) the instance that houses the community and the community sends an Announce to subscribers/followers of that community because it is a thing they care about, Mastodon interprets that as a “Boost”. Lemmy uses “Like” and “Dislike” for votes, which turns into a “Favorite” and (nothing?) on Mastodon. Lemmy uses Links not Notes because Lemmy is a link-aggregator that just happens to have the ability to link to a text post on lemmy itself.
I think there are some attempts at a more “universal” interface into the fediverse where you can choose to see a threaded/nested view like Lemmy or a stream-oriented microblog like Mastodon. At the moment there is no real solution as far as I can tell.
Thank you! That makes sense.
It definitely feels a bit like HTML 2.0 right now. I’m hoping some of this stuff gets standardized into the activitypub spec because it’s going to have to support not just microblogging, video sharing, photo feeds and link aggregators, but it’s also going to have to support any new social network concepts that pop up. It doesnt work if different networks interpret activity inconsistently. Still waiting for our HTML 5 moment.