I know that communities don’t translate well to Mastodon, I just find it a little odd how it seems to be a firehose of all comments in a community when viewed in Mastodon. I was expecting it to “repost” posts submitted to the community and have comments in the replies to those posts. Just something odd I was thinking about.
This is because of the way Lemmy solves the “missing responses” problem. ActivityPub doesn’t mandate a specific way to federate likes and responses, but the way Mastodon does this causes every server to have different replies and likes.
Lemmy forces the comments and likes to federate by boosting every one of them from the community actor, therefore ensuring that every server sees every comment. On Mastodon, you only see comments made by people someone on your server follows.
This leads to another rather annoying Mastodon problem, where someone will ask a question or pose a problem and will get a million of the same replies because everyone replying thinks they’re the first to come up with an answer (as their server shows a small subset of replies). It can look like a storm of reply-guys and probably doesn’t help Mastodon gain any popularity.
Lemmy and Mastodon both do this correctly from a spec point of view, but it’s an example of how two correct implementations of the same spec can still have trouble interoperating.
It is definitely strange to be on a small server. I’ll be like, “wow! This post has 67 likes!” Meanwhile if I view it from a large server it will actually be 1.4k
So does that mean that it’s unusable to host an instance on mastodon just for yourself?
Not at all. You can still search and see everything that you federate with, but posts, likes, etc. will not populate on your server automatically unless you follow them. Otherwise, the entire fediverse would have to populate every minute on your personal server. I don’t know how Lemmy handles that.
You also have to subscribe to communities to get their content.
That depends on what you want your experience to be. I run a teeny instance, don’t give a shit about a Twitter-like experience, and am happy getting content only from my direct follows. It’s great!
If you’re expecting a deluge of bullshit from randos, definitely go register at one of the big ones instead!
That’s exactly why I don’t like Mastodon.
So what’s the solution in regards to threading comments rather than having them as top level toots?
Use Lemmy to read Lemmy, unless Mastodon implements threading (which they probably won’t).
I have a Mastodon account on a niche server that I’m slowly starting to have feelings for and I have a Lemmy account on a niche server that I have feelings for. It’s not using one for the other, it’s just about being able to have the best federated experience.
Mastodon would have to implement support for this.