I think I joined the Fediverse misunderstanding how it works. I went in under the belief that:
- Under the hood, everything is an ActivityPub post
- Lemmy, Mastodon, PixelFed, and PeerTube are “interfaces” or “views” for the underlying ActivityPub post
- All 4 can interact with eachother
- I only need 1 account
For the last point I found out that the answer is “yes…but actually no.”
Based on the “ActivityPub Magic” thread (or Mastodon Post?), I see that Mastodon users can reply to the Lemmy thread (with some limitations) and follow Communities. Cool.
I see a Lemmy thread and a Mastodon post as serving 2 different purposes. Sometimes they overlap. But maybe I want to post something on my Mastodon timeline just for something general going on in my life that I don’t necessarily want to post into a Lemmy community. Now let’s say I started with a Lemmy account.
Unless I’m wrong, the only way to make that post would be to make a Mastodon account that’s seperate from my existing Lemmy account.
I thought part of the beauty of the Fediverse was that someone could be following “me” and choose whatever “interface” they want. Instead it looks like they would be following “me@Lemmy”, “me@Mastodon”, “me@PixelFed”, and “me@PeerTube”.
And then there’s the whole defederation of instances maybe requiring multiple accounts, but that’s another topic. Now, to be clear I do see the use case of having multiple accounts for different instances (e.g. having a furry account and a general one).
Is there a roadmap for “merging” accounts between platforms? I understand that question might be more towards Lemmy/Mastodon/etc. developers than server admins, but just seeing if anyone here knows.
I don’t have anything to add to this except I expected and wanted all of the above from the Fediverse too.
However, one thing of interest I found while digging into things about ActivityPub: You don’t actually need to create an account on anyone’s server to participate in the Fediverse at all. You can interact with it directly from your own personal site i.e. a blog or an art portfolio. There’s a Wordpress plugin for doing exactly this but I imagine there’s other ways to do it without Wordpress. I might actually try doing this soon now that I’m aware of that.
I think the main rub here is Lemmy. Lemmy isn’t a microblogging platform, which makes it so wildly different from other Fediverse platforms that it seems kinda silly that we’re here even trying to poke at it from Mastodon/PixelFed/etc.