And it also seems that mastodon can also be “syndicated” to these other communities, and vice versa? Is that true?

Are there limitations to any of this?

Apologies if this is not the perfect place to ask this question. I’m a lost old man. :-)

  • GoodKingElliot@feddit.ukOPEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Well, my understanding is that email is federated, and SMS text messages are federated, but it isn’t easy to email a phone number, or send a text to someone’s email. So I’m surprised that Kbin and Lemmy can talk to each other.

    But I see someone else answered that Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon all speak the same underlying protocol, ActivityPub. Now it’s starting to make sense.

    • Zamboniman@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      Glad it’s starting to make sense. And notice here that instead of replying on Lemmy, from my lemmy.ca account I am replying from Kbin, on my kbin.social account.

    • Shdwdrgn@mander.xyzEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I think your example of email and SMS messages is a good analogy… Just because they can talk to each other doesn’t mean the presentation is always correct. For example I’m on Lemmy, and I have seen replies by people on Mastodon in these threads. However the Mastodon replies have a different formatting so you will see the leading @user1 @user2 types stuff on those replies which really stands out when you’re reading from a threaded interface. And I can’t imagine how you would navigate through a lemmy/kbin post while using Mastodon.

      So yes, you could get to everything from a single user account, but I find it better to still have different accounts on Lemmy and Mastodon just to make it easier to view things in the intended presentation method. Maybe some day there will be flags embedded in each post so that one interface knows how to properly format what you are reading, we’re just not there yet.