Open Source @lemmy.ml chebra @mstdn.io 5mo ago

The federation between mastodon and lemmy is strange. If a M account wants to follow a L community, they need to follow an automated M account which represents the L community. But if any M post

The federation between mastodon and lemmy is strange. If a M account wants to follow a L community, they need to follow an automated M account which represents the L community. But if any M post mentions that L community, the post will get boosted by the community's M account, so everybody who follows will get a notification. And I'm not sure if this can be moderated from the L side, because it seems like it never goes through L. Such as - do you see this @opensource ? Does a L mod see this?

22 comments

I see it but your subject is just the post contents until it reached a character limit. So it looks like crap.
- @willya I'm actually amazed such interoperability works, it just needs better tools for catching the spam.
  
  It is truly awesome. Kbin/mbin goes a step further and gives you the choice of viewing the way you’d like. Haven’t used them though. My twitter use was very specific and mastodon definitely doesn’t fill that void.
- The first paragraph of a post sent from Mastodon (or Akkoma, Misskey etc.) to a Lemmy community will appear in Lemmy as a headline. The character limit is 200 characters, only if it is longer will it be cut off. The post itself is displayed in full. However, only one image is federated, for example.
I'm a random Lemmy user, and I see this as a post on the Lemmy OpenSource community, made by the user u/[email protected]

I agree that it's weird, but I didn't use Twitter much and I don't know what would be a more expected behavior
- @otter ouch, so that's even worse than I realized. I'm still getting some spam from the small abandoned M instances but only when it mentions the L name and it looks like even when it gets deleted from L, it still stays on the M side. I have spam posts in my timeline many hours old. This is bad because it looks like the only way to avoid them is to unfollow the community or block all spammers individually by myself.
  
  Oh TRUE, I didn't consider the spam posts. I've been removing what I can but I think that only helps the users on lemmy.ca, otherwise it's up to the admins of the instance where the Lemmy community is?
  
  Or do removals not federate onto Mastodon at all?
@chebra @opensource
See for yourself here: https://lemmy.ml/post/12065212
I wonder, will this show up as a reply or as a separate post on lemmy?

As a side note, I can't see many of your posts('toots') on my mastodon inst
ance, maly.io, and I had to go to you home instance to see this post, after I saw it on lemmy. Strange.

(P.S. hi @[email protected])
- @[email protected] @[email protected] And this is how it looks on the mastodon side, for anyone wondering: https://mstdn.io/@chebra/111950837765992663
  
  I think the federation sometimes takes a couple of minutes, I saw this lemmy thread through two lemmy instances, and they showed different comments. Eventually it should synchronize though. And mastodon posts older than a week usually aren't shown through other than the poster's main instance.
- It does seem to work -- let's see how a reply to a reply will appear on Mastodon.
  
  @[email protected] Even favourites/upvotes reciprocate! Quite a good integration they've got worked out.
It doesn't look like anybody put a lot of thought into it yet. Look at the title of your post on any Lemmy instance, at least where I'm reading it's just the first n characters of the text, cut off in mid sentence. Fortunately it's a work in progress!

The fact that there is some kind of federation is pretty cool but I hope Fedi devs at some point will have the time to implement better (and better formatted 🙂) communication between different instance softwares. It would suck if Lemmy sites just became a sort of red haired stepchild of the larger Fediverse.
"But if any M post mentions that L community, the post will get boosted by the community’s M account, so everybody who follows will get a notification."

That's not quite right: The Lemmy community boosts the post to the timeline, but not everyone who follows it from Mastodon (or Friendica, Akkoma etc.) receives a notification. The post then only appears in the timeline. You can set whether you want to receive a notification about new posts/boosts from an account
- @caos Yes, true, notification wasn't the right term. They will see it as a post from someone they follow. The problem is that I don't think the mods of the L community are able to ban M accounts from mentioning the L community, or prevent the reboost on the M side. Which means this kind of event is going to slip through. Or at least that's how I currently understand it, I'm trying to find out if it's really the case - who can moderate these spam mentions?
  
  I don't know what options there are for admins. lemmy.ml could (temporarily) defederate the instances from which the spam comes. From all Mastodon instances that have a completely free registration, at the moment spam is distributed through the whole fediverse. Lemmy users can block individual accounts, but I don't think this is possible with a whole instance.
  
  The problem is that I don’t think the mods of the L community are able to ban M accounts from mentioning the L community, or prevent the reboost on the M side.
  
  They can, same as any other account.
@[email protected] From the ActivityPub perspective (the protocol Mastodon and Lemmy uses), it's interesting how it all ties down. The protocol is fairly generic and doesn't really define what a user or community is, they're all just actors which can map to anything depending on the platform. Mastodon I believe treats all actors like an account. For Lemmy, they can be users or communities. When a post is directed at a community, it becomes a post. For a Wordpress blog, an actor would be an author or some meta actor for the whole blog. How those are interpreted and used is how it gets a little weird sometimes.

The automated account you mention, is it the tagginator bot? If so, well moderation is weird because the post is retracted but the tagginator reply to it which brings it into the Mastodon world is not, so effectively that doesn't mitigate the spam because it's a completely separate account linking to the spam, automatically because it's a bot.
For those that are confused, realize Lemmy and Mastodon are two ways of displaying the same ActivityPub information:

Mastodon "favorite" is a Lemmy "upvote"

A Lemmy "comment" is a Mastodon "reply"

A Mastodon post with a mention is a Lemmy post within a community

A Lemmy "community" on Mastodon appears as a Mastodon account that boosts (retweets) everything that tags (is posted within) it.

Viewing a Lemmy community from Mastodon shows the entire community (posts and comments) in chronological order. Yes, it's messy but doable.

Viewing a Lemmy account from Mastodon shows a feed of that user's posts with URLs to the Lemmy instance they were posted to.

If a Mastodon user mentions a community, that toot gets posted to the community. Replies to the toot appear as comments on Lemmy and replies on Mastodon.

As others have noted, a toot exceeding a Lemmy instances character limit (200 I think by default) will be cut off on Lemmy and "overflow" into the "body" of the post.

Things that don't directly "translate" AFAIK are the downvote arrow and the community moderator for both of which Mastodon has no equivalent.

22 comments