I think I joined the Fediverse misunderstanding how it works. I went in under the belief that:
- Under the hood, everything is an ActivityPub post
- Lemmy, Mastodon, PixelFed, and PeerTube are “interfaces” or “views” for the underlying ActivityPub post
- All 4 can interact with eachother
- I only need 1 account
For the last point I found out that the answer is “yes…but actually no.”
Based on the “ActivityPub Magic” thread (or Mastodon Post?), I see that Mastodon users can reply to the Lemmy thread (with some limitations) and follow Communities. Cool.
I see a Lemmy thread and a Mastodon post as serving 2 different purposes. Sometimes they overlap. But maybe I want to post something on my Mastodon timeline just for something general going on in my life that I don’t necessarily want to post into a Lemmy community. Now let’s say I started with a Lemmy account.
Unless I’m wrong, the only way to make that post would be to make a Mastodon account that’s seperate from my existing Lemmy account.
I thought part of the beauty of the Fediverse was that someone could be following “me” and choose whatever “interface” they want. Instead it looks like they would be following “me@Lemmy”, “me@Mastodon”, “me@PixelFed”, and “me@PeerTube”.
And then there’s the whole defederation of instances maybe requiring multiple accounts, but that’s another topic. Now, to be clear I do see the use case of having multiple accounts for different instances (e.g. having a furry account and a general one).
Is there a roadmap for “merging” accounts between platforms? I understand that question might be more towards Lemmy/Mastodon/etc. developers than server admins, but just seeing if anyone here knows.
I’m new to this too so don’t take me as an authority on the subject but I’m under the impression that Lemmy and Mastodon in particular were more compatible with each other but because they update separately they fell out of sync. I believe that currently mastodon users can interact with Lemmy posts and post to Lemmy communities but not vice versa. If you’re interested in both I think kbin users can post to instances on both projects.
Imo, a better way to view the different projects is simply to think about what social platform they’re filling a space of. Mastodon is like Twitter/Tumblr, while Lemmy is much more like reddit/forums. Pixelfed is like Instagram, peertube is like YouTube, etc etc etc. To me, since I was willing to have different accounts for all those social media I don’t mind having multiple throughout the fediverse (though I believe that as it grows and more people work on it as a whole we’ll see more projects interact with each other smoother)
Linking this article because I found it really helpful
I don’t have anything to add to this except I expected and wanted all of the above from the Fediverse too.
However, one thing of interest I found while digging into things about ActivityPub: You don’t actually need to create an account on anyone’s server to participate in the Fediverse at all. You can interact with it directly from your own personal site i.e. a blog or an art portfolio. There’s a Wordpress plugin for doing exactly this but I imagine there’s other ways to do it without Wordpress. I might actually try doing this soon now that I’m aware of that.
I think the main rub here is Lemmy. Lemmy isn’t a microblogging platform, which makes it so wildly different from other Fediverse platforms that it seems kinda silly that we’re here even trying to poke at it from Mastodon/PixelFed/etc.
I guess you could make a lemmy community where only you can post and it would act as a kind of blog, but you still can’t follow mastodon users. That’s actually something I want to do with my own instance and a custom frontend, because it seems perfect for what I want!
Not sure if merging different accounts would really be possible like that, you could do authentication using mastodon accounts similar to how you can log in with google, but there’s really no universal way of doing it over activitypub itself unless you want to send confirmation codes over it like we do over email heh.
It’s possible to point a custom domain to your existing fedi account with webfinger (you actually only need to make a file in .well-known on a web server), but I don’t think it’s possible to do it with multiple accounts. It would actually be cool if you could point people to your domain and have different fedi software figure out which one is the most appropriate, or present a list.
Also that custom domain won’t show up on the account itself, that’s another opportunity to maybe make identify separable from instances, so someone could be less dependent on it sticking around, I think bsky attempts to do something like that, but it also has quite a lot of holes in it and I feel like activitypub is a better foundation overall.
