I tried following a lemmy community in mastodon. It was super easy to follow a community just like a user. All posts were “boosted” by the community from the OPs to my feed. Great!
However my feed was immediately overwhelmed by a single lemmy community boosting not only the posts but every comment on all posts. My whole mastodon feed became an unordered list of lemmy comments.
Why are we implementing activitypub in this way? Shouldn’t communities boost the posts but leave comments as threads under the post? Does anyone know why lemmy works this way?
Also, would be lovely if every community had an “everything” user and a “hot” user. So like @technology@lemmy.ml and @technology_hot@lemmy.ml. It’s not a great experience to see literally every single post to a busy lemmy community in activitypub until they’ve gotten some upvotes.
PS - I am aware that integrating with mastodon is low priority, but if we’re going to use activitypub to share with non lemmy networks, we should be good citizens of it.
The exclamation point is specific to Lemmy. In Mastodon, search for and follow the user main@rblind.com or @main@rblind.com. You should now be able to follow and interact with it from Mastodon.
That said, Lemmy does not work well in Mastodon. @main@rblind.com acts as a bot user that reposts (boosts) all posts to the community in Lemmy. But it also reposts all top level comments. It will make your Mastodon timeline an unordered feed of comments.
I’ve complained about this, but apparently it’s a common pattern for community based activitypub networks (still unclear why). Activitypub doesn’t yet support communities properly and Lemmy has no plans to change this pattern.