cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28930199
A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
If there was a Reddit/Lemmy style website (where people create communities for various subjects but it’s all available from the same website using the same credentials) with forum style discussions
Isn’t this just Discourse?
I’ll go take a look, but isn’t it just the software behind the various forums and you need separate credentials for each one?
It has ActivityPub support so it is connected to the fediverse in some ways. Lemmy doesn’t work with it though AFAIK because Lemmy doesn’t support posts made outside communities.
I mean you could equally ask why does Lemmy not support posts outside communities? It’s on both parties to interoperate I think. Lemmy also uses a specific extension to ActivityPub while Discourse’s posts and Mastodon’s posts and such are pretty standard, but still not picked up by Lemmy.
I think Mastodon is very far from standard. Way I hear it from the developers, it’s lemmy that is following the Apub standard. But I will disclaim that I’m not an expert to judge either way.
As for the posts outside communities? That makes sense lemmy-wise I think. Where would those posts be? But it doesn’t make sense for Discourse, since they are indeed separated into topics.
I think Mastodon is very far from standard
I think it’s much closer to standard than Lemmy and I’ve looked into it quite a bit recently. ActivityPub is unfortunately quite focused on microblogging. Honestly lemmys way of doing it is a little hacky.
As for the posts outside communities? That makes sense lemmy-wise I think. Where would those posts be?
I actually think it’s quite straightforward, they’d just be on a users page. This is actually how Reddit has also done it ever since they introduced the feature (much before they enshittified everything else).
You can think of it like every users profile being a community of its own but only the user itself can post to it. Just conceptually speaking.
That would also let you follow users just as you can follow communities.
Its not that anyone is “doing it wrong” and Mastodon doesn’t really support Lemmys communities either. So Lemmy works in a bit of a funky way that doesn’t match most other fediverse services.
Its just a bit strange that Lemmy does not support the more common posts outside communities since that is how most of the fediverse works, so we’re kinda missing out on a lot of content that we can’t see on Lemmy.
This is the FEP Lemmy uses but most other fediverse services do not use it and Lemmy does not support anything that doesn’t use this FEP. So again, it’s not that Lemmy is doing something wrong, but Lemmy is not supporting how most of the rest of the fediverse functions.
We need this for sure
