... where every platform communicates with every other platform. i've rarely ever seen a post from mastodon on here, and even if it's technically possible, it doesn't seem that it happens very often.

likewise, i've rarely if ever seen a post from lemmy on mastodon. these two platforms just don't seem to interact much.

the fediverse is already very small. fragmenting it even further by having multiple services that basically don't talk to each other is not good. we need to either (a) aggressively find a way to bridge certain lemmy communities to be more visible on mastodon, especially location-based communities, or (b) i think that i'll have to decide to only use mastodon in the future, because that's where all my irl-friends are (yes i have those too, i do not only exist in a terminally online state :) and because mastodon is bigger already and that's why i think that it has a bigger chance of taking off.

so, what do i suggest should happen?

especially for location-based communities (australia, london, darmstadt, ...) it should be more probable for people living in these locations to draw use out of the lemmy community. maybe it's just a question of showing lemmy content from these communities on mastodon home pages, or auto-subscribing mastodon users to nearby lemmy communities. something like that.

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[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Mastodon is specialising in microblogging and, most importantly, interaction between single user accounts. It has absolutely no support for groups whatsoever.

Lemmy, in turn, is specialising in groups. And it has even less support for interaction between single users.

Mastodon users can theoretically subscribe to Lemmy communities. To them and to Mastodon, however, it's like following a user. Lemmy requires a title for each new post which aren't implemented in Mastodon (except for inbound Article-type objects).

Also, Mastodon has no support whatsoever for enclosed threaded conversations with exactly one post and otherwise comments. On Mastodon, everything is a post, and you have to jump through hoops to see an entire thread. If you want to reply to a post, and you want everyone in the thread to see your reply, you have to mention absolutely everyone who has participated in the thread so far.

Well, and then there are mentions which Mastodon automatically adds to replies, but which are unnecessary on Lemmy, as well as hashtags which are critically important for content discovery on Mastodon but entirely unsupported by Lemmy.

The other way around works even less because it's absolutely impossible for Lemmy users to follow Mastodon accounts.

Part of this mess are development politics. The Lemmy devs aren't even interested in properly federating with Mbin and PieFed, much less anything else that has groups and even less anything that doesn't. Gargron's goal has always been to make Mastodon appear to be the Fediverse proper, i.e. the Fediverse being a "decentralised walled garden" that only consists of Mastodon. And even if a Mastodon user was to stumble upon the non-Mastodon Fediverse, it was to look broken and inferior in comparison with Mastodon.

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I don't agree for Lemmy, they've shown some interest in working with and fixing bugs in relation to PieFed, Mbin, PeerTube, and to a lesser extent Mastodon (at least they added that hashtag feature).

But I agree with you for Mastodon, it almost seems like they want to push away the other platforms. It reminds me of the green bubbles in iMessage.