As of right now, you can follow either Lemmy accounts directly or follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon relatively easily if you know what you are searching for. This is really cool because you can read (and participate to !) discussions without having tu use a Lemmy-specific app or account. The wonders of the fediverse !

But the interaction through mastodon has a few issues, notably:

Communities repost comments too, making the community feed unreadable
Media in Lemmy posts are links, which make them quite cumbersome to watch (which is also the case in Lemmy itself ? I'm curious as to why) (minor problem)
To my knowledge, you can't post to a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but that's to be expected I guess. (minor problem)

The discussions on Lemmy often are more interesting than over on mastodon but I prefer mastodon's format so I am way more active over there. It would be way more pleasant to have everything in the same feed but because of 1. this isn't possible at the moment.

So the question is: does anybody know if Lemmy can or will fix any of these issues, especially n°1 ? Or is this something to be fixed on Mastodon's side ?

sry for English 🙃

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[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

Out of scope, yes. But it sure would be nice from a more abstract perspective. Right now content flows in one direction. Lemmy->Mastadon, but not vice versa.

This could be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on whether you are a content creator or content consumer. If you're creating content, a post to Lemmy will have a wider reach (huzzah!). But if you're a lazy lurker and want to check fewer streams, then you sign up to Mastadon and get both (huzzah!).

Anecdote from history, for comparison.

Back in the late 80s, early 90s, when OS/2 and Windows were competing for marketshare, this was a choice that IBM made -- to make a Windows compatibility layer on OS/2. Technically, it was a masterpiece, and increased the number of programs available to OS/2 users. Why choose Windows when you can choose OS/2 and you can select from the best apps from both ecosystems! Except it backfired within a few years -- developers stopped developing for OS/2 entirely, instead targeting the Windows API because they could reach both platforms with it.

I suspect that Mastadon being able to draw content from Lemmy, and not vice versa, is a similar thing here. But I'm unsure if it will help or harm Lemmy.