If lemmy created a community the same name as the username when someone signs up. You could follow a lemmy user and then when your on mastodon (once we’re federated with mastodon) you could see their self posts in their community as a mastodon post and vice versa.

  • DessalinesM
    3•4 years ago

    Lemmy speaks activitypub, but we are the very first to center around the activitystreams term groups, IE communities here. The entire rest of the fediverse is based around following federated users (IE, the twitter model), while we’re focused on following federated communities (reddit / forum model).

    So no other implementation supports group follows yet, and we likewise don’t support user follows yet.

    • @0x1C3B00DA@lemmy.ml
      1•4 years ago

      I understand a bit of ActivityPub, but I haven’t done any development with it so excuse me if I’m mispeaking. Here’s my understanding.

      A Group is a type of Actor and a Person is a type of Actor. All Actors have an inbox and outbox. The actor POSTs activities (Create, Delete, etc) to their own outbox, which other actors can view. A Follow signifies to the receiving server that an actor at the originating server wants to know when there are new messages in the receiving actor’s outbox. So when the actor adds a new activity to the outbox, the server would notify any follows, and they would check the outbox for the activities.

      So wouldn’t following a group be the same as following a user? Software that supports one already knows how to support the other. I can see how a server may want to display messages from different actor types differently, but that’s stylistic. Isn’t a Create from a group essentially the same as a Create from a person?

      • @nutomic@lemmy.ml
        3•4 years ago

        Afaik one problem with Mastodon are the HTTP signatures, because they are using an older version. So theres more than just ActivityPub which might need changes. And just figuring out what needs to be adjusted will take time.

      • DessalinesM
        2•4 years ago

        A create post in a group, originates not from the group, but from one of its members, who may not even live on that server. Then that create needs to get pushed in some way to the federated community, which then needs announce to all its followers. Its very different from a person create, which always originates from the same server, and goes to its own followers.