I am still learning this whole thing and I ended up creating accounts here and on Mastodon. Is that necessary or do I automatically have a Mastodon username with my Lemmy? I used the same stuff on both accounts, can I merge them or something?
Edit: thanks everyone, I can’t respond to each comment while I’m at work, but I appreciate every one of you!
I get that there are different apis for Lemmy and Mastodon (and maybe Lemmy and kbin), but I’m interested to know why you can’t create a server that supports both/all apis. Even if it’s not possible to support the correct ui on a website, why am I not allowed to log into an app that would display all the ui correctly regardless of whether your account is from mastodon/lemmy/kbin.
Because they’re all different applications. I think the confusion here is between ActivityPub the protocol, and the applications that actually use it. The applications that use AP to federate are all different, they have different data structures, hell mastodon and Lemmy/kbin are completely different at a conceptual level. They just communicate with each other via AP, but once they receive the AP message they convert it into their own data structures and concepts. And you should note that AP is technically a communications protocol, it doesn’t prescribe how stuff should be stored or sorted after an object is communicated between two servers and doesn’t really prescribe a way to browse through the historical activities of a person. These are things implemented by the application you’re using. So it’s not like you could just write an app that combs through all that data available on the fediverse, you’d need an instance that federates with all these places, then an app that uses that instance. Technically feasible but so far nobody’s done it yet, but you can see how some people reply to threads on Lemmy via Mastodon.
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