Lemmy developers have said there are no near plans for allowing users to follow mastodon or other activityPub networks, so I’m considering another platform that can do this.

It looks like mbin, Piefed and FediLab have the ability to do this. Has anyone tried them and have a comparison?

I also heard it may be possible to do from just mastodon-like platforms. Anyone tried this?

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    24·
    3 months ago

    PieFed dev here - if you want to follow Mastodon accounts, I recommend Mbin.

    About 20% of the content in piefed.socal comes from Mastodon but it’s through indirect means (a.gup.pe groups, mastodon users @mention-ing communities). Mastodon users can reply to PieFed posts and receive your replies to their comments.

  • Remy Rose@piefed.socialEnglish
    8·
    3 months ago

    I can’t say that the ability to follow individual people is really something I care about, but coming from Piefed, it does seem to work just fine. So does Peertube and any of the other ones I’ve bothered to try.

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.alEnglish
    72·
    3 months ago

    Someone posted something recently that checked a bunch of functionality across different networks.

    • matcha_addictOPEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      But if the feature already exists in another platform, I’d gladly use that instead.

      Plus, lemmy developers said this would be a very difficult change to make and requires a lot of rewriting. I presume it is because activityPub was only added to lemmy much later on.

      • nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
        13·
        3 months ago

        We created Lemmy from the very start with federation in mind. But it was always meant to be a Reddit alternative, which means community focused. I don’t see any reason to add user following when that’s already supported by a dozen other Fediverse platforms, and would only dilute our main focus. I believe in the Unix philosophy: do one thing and do it well.

        • matcha_addictOPEnglish
          6·
          3 months ago

          Hey nutomic! Thanks for adding the context. I hope my comments above didn’t mis-represent what you said, and I’d like to add that I respect your position to not add a lot more work on the plate if it doesn’t agree with your goals, especially when other platforms that do it exist (which is what I’m asking about in this post).

          However I do respectfully disagree with the point on unix philosophy: unix philosophy also talks about interoperability, and you can see that with unix tools everywhere being very interoperable among each other. In my humble opinion, lemmy is not quite there yet with interop regarding other fediverse platforms, when that is a key benefit of the fediverse.

          This isn’t meant as an attack. This is surely easier said than done, and your work on lemmy has been amazing and I applaud it. But I also cannot confidently say lemmy is following unix philosophy in an exact sense here, not until interop is fully functional.

          Cheers and thanks again for the great work!

          • nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            Interop with microblogging is not the main purpose of Lemmy. The main purpose is to have a federated Reddit, with federation between Lemmy instances. That it can also connect with other platforms like Mastodon is more like a neat side effect.

          • atro_city@fedia.io
            21·
            3 months ago

            Given nutomic’s response, I see what you mean. You could use mbin (I’m using fedia.io) instead. Others probably suggested other stuff too. Good luck!

          • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            Honestly I think there’s pretty gold interop already between lemmy and mastodon. There’s some difficulty with seeing the the images from each other primarily and a way to reply to cross post / boost a mastodon note into a lemmy post so that replies are visible by the op in mastodon would be a killer feature, but everything else works.

            I kinda agree that following mastodon accounts is out of scope for lemmy as the concept of following the doesn’t make sense within the link aggregate concept. It would require lemmy devs to add a whole microblogging architecture for follows to make sense.