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How does microblogging on Lemmy communities work? (kbin.social)

submitted 2 years ago by ppptan@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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I'm guessing it has something to do with mastodon, since microblogging is interoperable with mastodon like how threads are interoperable with lemmy.

Example post:
https://kbin.social/m/technology@beehaw.org/p/434431

I can see this post on beehaw here:
https://beehaw.org/post/565892

But next to it in technology@beehaw.org are threads that show up in the threads section of kbin.social/m/technology@beehaw.org

How are threads and microblogs distinguished on different instances if they're both interoperable with both lemmy and mastodon like this appears to be? How can you access the general mastodon feed from kbin?

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[–] Otome-chan@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

kbin by default throws everything that isn't formatted like a kbin thread into "microblogs". For whatever reason that thread on beehaw had an issue so it got put in the microblog section. I saw a similar issue result when one beehaw user tried to include a hashtag in the title of their thread, breaking it for both lemmy users and kbin users (lemmy displayed it weird, kbin put it in microblog section).

threads are essentially "special" microblogs with extra info. Mastodon posts will show up usually under the microblog section, but sometimes may end up in a thread depending on the situation.

On a technical level, lemmy users, kbin users, and mastodon users can all see the same content, just formatted differently.

[–] ppptan@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@Otome-chan@kbin.social So is there some way to see mastodon content without subscribing to individual people first?

[–] Otome-chan@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Mastodon uses the "twitter model" of things. You can see posts in one of two ways:

follow someone, and you can see their posts
search for a tag or query, and related posts will show up.

I think mastodon also lets you see every post made on the instance or in general as one big feed as well (but twitter doesn't do this).

Here on kbin, mastodon posts are automatically categorized for us and grouped into different magazines. if you click into a magazine and click on "microblog" you can see the mastodon posts. similarly, you can go to @random magazine to see just a general feed of things.

notably, the fediverse doesn't discriminate between things, so a mastodon user can reply to your comment here, and you'd be able to see their response like normal.

on kbin, we can follow magazines which group content by topic, or we can follow people, and just get everything those people post. the former is the "reddit style" of doing things, while the latter is the "twitter style".

For mastodon users, everything "works" like the latter "twitter style", whereas their posts for us show up sometimes as "reddit style" and sometimes as "twitter style" depending on the context.

[–] ppptan@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@Otome-chan@kbin.social

@random

Okay, so just do whatever and it'll work itself out. Go to "threads" if I'm in the mood to see reddit-type stuff and go to "microblog" if I'm in the mood to see twitter-type stuff.

Thanks for the good explanation.

[–] Otome-chan@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

yup. that's a good way to treat it: threads for reddit-type stuff, microblog for twitter-type stuff.

[–] dannekrose@kilioa.org 1 points 2 years ago

@ppptan

Correct. The post was associated with the magazine/community. It was created on kbin inside a magazine so it was associated with the magazine in the same way a Mastodon user could insert the community address in the Mastodon post and have their post show up in the Lemmy instance in the Community area.

What Kbin is doing differently is that it's accepting posts from the wider fediverse which was created on platforms "unaware" of communities or magazines. Lemmy ignores those unless they contain specific community addresses, but kbin doesn't and instead routes those based on hashtags or to the "random" magazine. You can see in the "random" magazine tons of microblog posts which don't seem to be related to anything or stand-alone posts.

[–] dannekrose@kilioa.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@ppptan

This FAQ gives a little bit of some details I managed to figure out as it relates to kbin.

https://kbin.social/m/kbinfaqs@kilioa.org/t/20459/A-small-FAQ-to-hopefully-help-new-users-to-kbin

I think it's because your post tagged the lemmy community that it showed up.

[–] ppptan@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

@dannekrose How did it tag it? I just went to https://kbin.social/m/technology@beehaw.org/microblog and typed "test"