I’ve heard that federation is broken right now on Beehaw. When it comes back, will I be able to access Beehaw from Mastodon? How would I do that?
You can follow communities from the Mastodon app, but the experience will be “microblog-y” in nature. Communities are represented as users on Mastodon. So, search for @technology@beehaw.com on Mastodon. You will see all the posts in the community as “toots,” and all comments as replies.
Lemmy apps are in the works, which will have a native link aggregator UX.
Edit: Better answered by @tezoatlipoca@lemmy.ca
You can “follow” communities on a Lemmy instance just like a regular user.
Lets say we’re talking support@beehaw.org (and the federation isn’t bork).
Search for @support@beehaw.org in Mastodon and (if the federation isn’t bork) it should find the community as a user and you can follow.
Followed communities in Mastadon:
- all posts and comments show in an amorphous stream as individual toots – depending on what interface you use it could be just random toots or they’re displayed threaded
- they all show as boosts from the community “user”… which if you think about it, that’s all a community does - it reboots all posts and comments-on-posts to all subscribers of the community.
That was easier than I expected. On the Mastodon instance that I use, no previous posts show up (I tried a few communities on other servers). I believe that’s because no one has previously subscribed from that server, so they weren’t federated yet. I’ll watch them over the next few hours.
No actually its because msgs “boosted” by the community will only be sent to your inbox post-follow, if that makes sense. For the same reason when you search for and sub to a community on one Lemmy instance to a comm. on another, it only gets the last few posts; but your instance will get all the ones that come after.
Essentially following a lemmy community is like a magazine subscription; you don’t get all the previous ones retroactively, but you get all the ones that come after you subscribe/follow.
