Should I have separate Lemmy and Mastodon accounts?
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!
They have different UIs that are better tailored to their respective platforms so imo it’s better to have accounts on both.
You don’t need to have a single account for everything and it’s far better for several reasons not to, even when it comes to Lemmy. Your browser and apps remember your account details for you anyway.
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.
I think maybe look at it the other way around. We should hope that one account at your preferred place (whether it’s kbin, mastodon or lemmy) be able to access everything. So if you have a mastodon account, you can already access content in the lemmyverse, albeit a bit clumsy. This is not possible from a lemmy account, afaik.
So once everything is united, you would be able to see content from anywhere in a format you enjoy through your one account
@toasteranimation I feel like that’s what I’m asking for. I create one account, and then use it to log into a mastodon app to see things in a mastodon layout, and use it to log into a lemmy app to see things in a lemmy layout, etc. Currently I have one account that can only log into mastodon apps, and for some reason can’t log into lemmy apps.
Ok it’s early! Sorry for the misunderstanding. Yes, you can only log into mastodon apps with your mastodon account, but you CAN browse lemmy communities through mastodon and even interact with them. I’ve seen videos of people doing it, but on desktop not mobile.
@toasteranimation I’m actually replying to this from my mastodon account on a mastodon app, so I’m perfectly aware it’s possible. The layout is just suboptimal. I’m just wondering why can’t/if an app can be created that I log into with my mastodon account, but shows a layout like lemmy.
Roger. I’m slowly coming up to speed here as the caffeine circulates. As people have explained it here, there are differences in how the microblogs and lemmy instances store their posts/comments/upvotes etc. These formatting differences at the programming level seem to be where the friction is when I’ve asked similar questions. People say, ‘well, upvotes and downvotes don’t work the same way, etc’ . I share your desire and instinctively thought it would be possible when I dove in here last week, but there are issues making a completely unified fediverse app that shows content from all places in your preferred format. I’m an Apollo refugee, so I want my Apollo-clone app (wefwef) that I’m using to show me mastodon content in MY preferred format, but it’s a no go right now. I’m sure an app will come along and make this possible soon. As of now, the kbin people are explicitly aiming to do just this (blend all content from both sides) so try kbin.social for that. I think it’s still buggy
@toasteranimation fair enough. I understand that a lot of this software is still having growing pains, so makes sense that the answer is essentially no for now, maybe if you wait (or try to implement it yourself)
It’s all so new and devs are rushing in so things will evolve quickly. Kbin kinda does the job, but once you try it, you’ll just go back to where you came from because the flow is clumsy, especially if you’re used to something else.
I have separate accounts. You don’t have to, but Mastodon has a design that makes following Lemmy communities a terrible experience.
There are apps out there, like Fedilab, that have a thread view just like Reddit and such, but on desktop I don’t know about any good threaded Mastodon client.
Sadly, there’s no good way to share account credentials between the two either.
Mastodon has an API of its own, just like Lemmy. You can follow/respond/like things cross platform, but the client apps need their own special API for sending data to the server.
It’s a real shame, because the ActivityPub standard that makes following other servers possible also has a spec detailing how to do client/server communication, but very few ActivityPub servers have bothered to implement it.
The only serve software I know of that implement the client-server API is Fedbox. There’s a server running it on federated.id but it doesn’t have a frontend. You can only use it with client apps like AndStatus. Don’t expect anything as polished as Mastodon or Lemmy.
I have shortly looked into making some kind of bridge so you can use the same account for a self-run Lemmy+Mastodon server, but that’s quite a big pain to set up. Sadly, combining accounts just don’t seem practical.
That said, absolutely nothing is stopping you from following a Lemmy community from Mastodon. Just subscribe to @community (so replacing the ! with an @) and you’ll get every single post and comment on it in your feed. If you use something like Fedilab it’ll almost usable, I think?
I have separate accounts for Lemmy and Pixelfed/Mastodon. Their content is so different, that it's hard to find a unified way of interacting with it (following accounts vs. subscribing to and interacting within communities).
If you still prefer to combine both, you could make an account on kbin.social. With that you can follow both Mastodon and Lemmy content and get a "unified" UI. I cannot say how well it works though, since I haven't tried it myself.
You can interact on both platforms using one account, but the best experience is to have an account on each - Lemmy communities don't work very well on Mastodon, and Mastodon users can't be followed from Lemmy. Kbin is the middle ground which can do both.
That’s the way I personally do it. I’d love to be able to merge my lemmy and calckey accounts but a lot of us are still finding our feet in the fediverse right now. I’ve personally moved from a mastodon to a calckey instance and switched from one lemmy instance to another.
I keep them separate -- I don't like a single point of failure, and we're all so early on the fediverse stuff that I'm sure a few servers and services will implode in the near future before things settle down. Would be a real hassle to have everything attached to a single account.
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