• Value SubtractedOPMA
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    41 month ago

    siiiiiiiiiiiiigh

    But yeah, federation between Mastodon and Lemmy is pretty unidirectional. Users on (most) Mastodon instances can use their accounts to post to Lemmy and follow Lemmy users, but it doesn’t really work in the other direction.

    • Admiral Patrick
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      31 month ago

      That’s what I’ve noticed. At one point, I recall being able to at least search for a Mastodon user from Lemmy and have them come up in search results (no posts and couldn’t follow). I just spot checked that, and it doesn’t seem to do that anymore. I know little about Mastodon so can’t even speculate which side the problem may be on.

      One day I figure it’ll be a two way street.

      • Value SubtractedOPMA
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        31 month ago

        At one point, I recall being able to at least search for a Mastodon user from Lemmy and have them come up in search results (no posts and couldn’t follow).

        Hmm, I think that still works provided the Mastodon user has interacted with Lemmy in some way. It will pull up their bio and posts/comments made on Lemmy, but that’s it.

        I think the difficulty lies in the way the two platforms treat user accounts. On Mastodon, it’s pretty straightforward - a user is a user.

        On Lemmy, the users are users, and the community federates to Mastodon as a “group” that boosts/retweets every single post and comment that users make to that community. It’s not really ideal, but I’m not sure if it can be improved considering the radically different structure of each platform. This is what the Quark’s feed looks like on Mastodon:

        A screenshot of @quarks@startrek.website as seen on Mastodon, showing the various users being "boosted".

        • Admiral Patrick
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          31 month ago

          Interesting. Could be they’ve never interacted with Lemmy then. I just tried to pull up George Takei’s Mastodon account from Lemmy, and no results. (@georgetakei@universeodon.com). I vaguely recall searching for another user in the past (months ago), and they did come up in search. Unless I’m just doing it wrong (always a possibility).

          It’s not really ideal, but I’m not sure if it can be improved considering the radically different structure of each platform.

          Yeah. I don’t know what changes would need to be made to Lemmy to support following users. There is a person_follow table in the DB, though, so maybe the framework is there but incomplete?