In theory, Lemmy and Mastodon are compatible with one another, as they both use ActivityPub.

In practice:

Mastodon users can only see Lemmy posts as Boosts ("retweets"), and from what I hear, it's fairly annoying and not a good experience

Lemmy users can't see anything on Mastodon at all, Lemmy doesn't have a way to federate with Mastodon instances yet.

This is the first time Lemmy has seen this many users ever, so I'm confident both of these issues will be fixed sooner or later. When they are, you'll be able to see Lemmy posts on Mastodon as if they were posts ("tweets"), and you'll be able to see Mastodon posts on Lemmy as some kind of post (not sure if the format has been decided yet).

@pankkake @ubergeek77 I'll actually use this as a an opportunity to test something - I copied your comment's link into mastodon and am replying to it with my mastodon account. I can see the thread in mastodon, and in theory, this reply should show up properly in Lemmy too.

I would like to add to your picture yggdrasil and matrix based messengers, as this will help infrastructure to be more robust and expand

@ubergeek77 @pankkake you can comment and make lemmy posts from Mastodon and others. I'm on Friendica for example and made this comment from my Friendica profile.

It's all a little arbitrary. When you create a new service (like Lemmy, or Mastodon), you can have them link with anything, in any fashion you like. The defaults are mostly sensible.

For example, I've just made a mastodon post asking /r/casual a question. Once that synchronizes across, you'll see the topic over there.

Yeah, I think it has a certain charm. However I fully agree, without it being addressed this will lead to issues and setbacks in the future trying to build communities. For now I'm subbing to all and trusting the process that creases will eventually iron themselves.

I think, kept this way, instances should be more clear what kind of 'country' they want to form. For example a group that has tech as the primary interest, should go about starting the instance as such, and setting ground rules for communities therein. Tech related, even if loosely, and differentiated from the masses. Or a better example would be, a European - English Instance could require a suffix like EU or UK like newsUK or photographyUK simply to attract the more locally relevant audiences.

A more involved solution could be to tag your community like Twitter into topics it wants to show up in feeds for (as well as tags that exclude it).. like 'technews' tagged in the 'news' and 'technology' but excluded from 'politics' and 'finance' and 'onion'

Another one could be to allow communities to federate with one another. If a news community spots some large news audiences in other instances, the moderators for each community could federate with one another and create a supercommunity (like a multi on Reddit), allowing the super to operate on both instances but share hosting of something along those lines.

You could also have moderators agree to join forces by migrating one community over to the larger server and closing up shop. This may happen naturally with time.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, but especially with the amount of news users (and subs) migrating from Reddit there is a certain potential for chaos for sure.

However, for me the pros of this approach still outweigh the cons as, like you said, it also provides more choice with which community you want to interact.

Like chess, but are a bit tired of googling en passant? Just find a community, that is more focused on the game on a different instance.

I saw a reddit post about alternatives and lemmy was what stuck out the most, and then there was another about how it works (not that indepth) and from there I got to lemmy.world and been here since yesterday

It would be great if the instance kept a pulse on how federation to other instances is going and showed a health check in the app sidebar and near instance names to temper user expectations.

That sounds like a great idea!

Mastodon is written in RoR, whereas Lemmy's backend is in Rust. It's an order of magnitude faster just by being a compiled language with lighter-weight middleware.

I haven't used Ruby/RoR in half a decade but even in the early 2010's it was memingly slow compared to many alternatives.

Although this issue might be more severe for Lemmy, I think it still occurs on Reddit, but it ends up working itself out. For instance, there's also a "r/tech" and (at some point) there was a "r/technologynews" subreddit, which you could view as redundant and possibly confusing to new users. But r/tech seems to have focused on longer-form more in-depth discussion while r/technology is certainly the larger and more general of the two, so most users will probably just sub to the larger one and maybe others will decide they like the vibe of r/tech more. In the long term, I'm sure a similar thing will happen to communities with the same, or close to the same, name.

I think you guys are entirely missing the point of a decentralized community and want to make it centralized. You come to lemmy with the expectation that it is something else, and when finding that it has some differences, you want to change it to fit your view. Come with an open mind and see the strong points. Because what you get is much more than what you miss.

Having two (or even more) communities/subs for the same topic is a feature. I understand that you think that having the community split in 2 might not be ideal, but that is the price to be paid for decentralization. And decentralization is the way to go. If one actor stars misbehaving, we easily have alternatives. One community starts being too draconian? Go to the other one. Start a new one. One community goes down due to too much bandwidth? You have the other one. Decentralization is so so good. I suggest watching some videos on the topic. You will grow to love it.

Now, the 2 technology communities: Pick both if you want. Interact with them, in different ways. Don't spam of course. But it will sort itself out. One of the communities will prevail as the bigger one and the other as the smaller. See it as a sort of evolution of communities.

Merging the communities would be wrong. That would defeat the purpose of decentralization! What could be done, is some sort of "tagging" for easier subscribing. If both of these communities were tagged as "technology", than you could subscribe to the tag "technology" and it would subscribe to both subs. Just some UX thing. But they need to remain 2 separate subs!

It'd be cool if there was some mechanism where Community A could follow Community B, so that all posts from Community B automatically show up in A. This way, you could also aggregate communities with different names, create multiple custom front pages etc.

I think that's fine. Each instance will likely have its own culture, so you can choose which instance's community is best for you. I might prefer gaming on lemmy.world, technology on beehaw, etc

People have been begging for this. Lemmy is open source, I'm sure someone will make a PR for it eventually. There is even a bounty for it on BountySource.

Selfhosting squad! o/

For me it clicked instantly after reading e-mail analogy.

I did the same. Started on .ml then moved to .world to spread the load. Also heard some things about the mods on .ml