Here's the thing. I'm a mod for a small-time community for a niche interest, !castles@lemm.ee I'm also on Mastodon, and was before my Reddit exodus. I follow #castles as well as a few other related topics on Matsodon, so I get quality toots, such as this: https://mastodon.scot/@McNige/110926238926867959, that I wish I could just crosspost over to my community. Currently, I have to repackage the toot, which isn't a huge problem, but currently I just drop them a note on Mastodon that their content has been posted elsewhere on the Fediverse. What would be nice is if people who comment on the Lemmy post also get fed into OP's toot. More sharing, more connection, more activity.
On the flip side, I've subscribed to @castles@lemm.ee on my Mastodon instance and, while it's good to be able to follow posts in feed form, it looks like ass: 
I realize I should try this with Pixelfed, but I haven't made that leap yet.
I don't know, am I thinking crazy here? I'd think we'd want everything in the Fediverse soup interoperable in a more seemless way. Is this a feature request or am I missing some way to do this better?
I 100% agree with this. I don't really know the solution or even understand all the federation details of why they don't interoperate better, but it's definitely irritating to me that as far as I know, I can't:
It's, like, so close to just being a single global software-agnostic communication place that anyone can rock with. But it's not. If anyone knows any solution I can use that can do some facsimile of both of those things please let me know (someone suggested Friendica as a solution but I haven't really looked into it in detail yet).
(Edit: Be on Mastodon and follow a Lemmy community and start to see posts in a way that's not ridiculous. Just have the community show up as an Actor, posts come from the user that posted them and the community Actor "retoots" them or whatever. No I don't know the internal details of why that way is hard to do or doesn't make sense, that's just how I want it to be.)
Yes, so close is exactly what I'm thinking too. Let's hope it gets there soon, before reddit's next big fuck-up to push everyone away (birdsite is doing a pretty good keeping up with fucking up, so less worries there).
I don't think it's that ridiculous? I mean I see the post title and user its from, with the link to the post. I wouldn't expect Mastodon to show a huge post in the middle of my feed of all the little toots, so idk what more I could ask for
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Die4Ever@programming.dev/110939335701439601
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Die4Ever@programming.dev/110939335701439601/reblogs
edit: incognito seems to cause those links to automatically redirect? which is maybe a good feature actually?
So, if I try to follow /c/technology@lemmy.world from my Mastodon account, then when I pop open my feed what shows at the top is this:
I don't want /c/technology to "boost" individual ~~posts~~ (edit: comments) from that sub such that they show up with no context in my feed. If what happened was that individual posts from the sub showed in my feed, and comments on the post showed up as replies under that post, that would be swell. IDK the technical details of the issue, or if there's anything I can do on my end to make this work better, but in my limited experimentation it looks like I just can't follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon without ruining my feed with these individual context-less comments.
Yes I do see communities boosting the comments too, they are marked as replies properly if I click on them. You're right though there's no way for Mastodon to follow a community without your feed getting filled with comments instead of just posts.
But I think the community needs to boost the comments in order for them to federate properly, so idk if there's a nice way that this could be solved.