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So far … finding this isn’t working for lemmy communities while the same lemmy communities work fine on an ordinary RSS feed app (feedly). Still some kinks to iron out it seems.
Actually, it works well enough. There appears to have been some delay from the test community on lemmy.ml that didn’t occur with my rss app (feedly), so probably a hiccup.
Posts come through with kinda ok formatting (which is a challenge given mastodon’s constraints).
Compared to mastodon, links to external sources are actually provided (mastodon only renders a link to the original lemmy post).
But, it seems that when a link is provided in a lemmy post, a link to the original lemmy post is not, which is annoying.
Still … It works … kinda nice once you combine it with lists and making the lists exclusive (ie posts in the list don’t appear in the home timeline).
Umm … is so this could be a better way for mastodon users to follow lemmy communities right?
Trying right now with this community.
I’ve successfully got a “parrot” account for this community created: @lemmy.ml.c.fediverse@rss-parrot.net
Question now is to see how posts and comments come through, where this comment is a test (to see if it comes through or not).
Why is following lemmy via ActivityPub directly not an option?
Currently, Lemmy communities appear as group accounts on mastodon which boost every post or comment posted to/in a community. This is effectively useless except for extremely low traffic communities maybe.
It’s not clear to me whether this is a Lemmy or Mastodon issue.
It’s basically a mastodon problem.
Mastodon doesn’t have a true group interface but just models it as like a user boosting everything which is a poor interface to group discussions.
The whole firehose problem where every comment gets put into your feed is the major symptom of this, where the idea of groups is that they’re hierarchical and give you the option to look at the comments if you want.
On top of that, mastodon lacks threading. It has basic one-level threading now, which I honestly find more confusing sometimes than everything being flattened.
A very annoying issue is that mastodon doesn’t render links from lemmy posts as they’re part of the metadata, which, AFAICT, lemmy does correctly according to ActivityPub but mastodon ignores. I’m not sure but images might have a similar problem (?).
Relatedly, mastodon has no post formatting like bold, underlining etc, so all of that gets ignored (though I’ve heard masto might start respecting the formatting of other platforms to some extent).
TLDR: mastodon is actually a relatively brutalist or minimalist platform. It’s defined in many ways more by what it isn’t than what it is and is otherwise a Twitter clone.
Beyond that, It’s not a good fediverse citizen in that its constraints combined with its dominance are a bit of a stranglehold on the rest of the fediverse.
IE, if they at least had a decent interface to lemmy and groups in general, the Reddit migration here could have been a bigger deal, as the promise of the fediverse could have actually been fulfilled.
Instead of joining a new platform with few users (lemmy), Reddit migrants could have been joining a new ecosystem with plenty of users (fediverse, lemmy+mastodon) expanding into a new interface.
