I don’t know if this is the better place to post this, but this is something annoying me in the fediverse, especially using/following Lemmmy and Mastodon profiles/communities.
I also don’t know if this is being working on or else, but would improve federation a lot, at least in my view…
The thing is how Lemmy posts appear in my Mastodon timeline, shouldn’t they be better? The posts instead of links should be the images of the post, and the replies, under the replies in Mastodon. I don’t know if this possible… but would be more organized.
I posted a picture of what I imagine… the current form you can find in this link here
It’s partly an issue of keys. Every fediverse actor has a private key and a public key. When my instance sends this to fediverse@lemmy.world, it’s signed by my private key, and lemmy.world uses my public key to verify it. When fediverse@lemmy.world sends this comment out, it uses it’s own private key to sign it. It can’t just re-transmit my comment, because it doesn’t have my private key. All it can do is Announce that I’ve made the comment (and sign the Announce).
Mastodon treats Announces as Boosts, so every post/comment is interpreted as a thing that fediverse@lemmy.world has boosted, so you get all these un-connected posts appearing. I think it’s mostly up to Mastodon to remedy.
It works better if a Mastodon actor posts into a Lemmy community, then you get the mix like you imagine. e.g.: https://mastodon.world/@Flash/112095241193510662 (this particular post was crowbarred into Lemmy via !tails@lemmon.website, but it would be the same if the author had done it.)
Thank you for explaining it! This is a good answer! But do you think there’s something that could solve this, or is impossible/unreallistic as the servers act with each other?
I don’t think it’s technically impossible - all the information that another site needs to properly interpret some activity is in the JSON that’s sent. I get the sense that it might be unrealistic to expect Mastodon to make the necessary changes though. It seems more of a political issue than a technical one.
Do you think is unrealistic? Why do you think Mastodon has political issues to make the necessary changes?
Lemmy doesn’t seem to get much recognition in the wider Fediverse - it tends to get bundled as part of ‘other apps’. Mastodon is much bigger, so better integration with Lemmy probably gets deprioritised below their own issues and feature requests (e.g. I was reading today that Markdown support is often requested, but the base version still doesn’t have it)