this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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My point is that you can have a "content-centric" application separate from the "user-centric" application, but they are just different ways to represent and interact with the data in the social graph and as such they don't need separate APIs.
yeah, i think embedding Lemmy content into Mastodon is trivial, because you just show the post. But the other way around, embedding Mastodon posts into Lemmy could be a bit more tricky, because in what community do you show the post? There could be a virtual community for each Mastodon server, like when you post something on mastodon.de, then it's displayed on the lemmy community /c/all@mastodon.de
What do you think of this?
In ActivityPub terms, there is no such thing as a "Mastodon posts" or "Lemmy communities". You just have "authors" and "audiences". In effect, it would mean that you emulate a "post to a community" by writting a post with the community as the "audience", and anyone that follows the actor that represents the group (equivalent to the Lemmy Community) would find the posts.
so you are saying that each author should represent their own community that they populate with posts each time they post something
I am not sure whether "represent" is the right word here. What I mean is that all posts have a "recipient" (the audience).
For Mastodon, you have public posts where the recipient is literally a "special" audience, called
https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public. If you want to see a private message to alice, you just change the "audience" to contain only thehttps://example.com/aliceactor URI.To post to a community, it's the same logic: if you are posting on
fediverse@lemmy.world, then the message has "https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse" as the audience. This message is then sent to lemmy.world and processed.Ok, so from a user's perspective, where would Mastodon content appear in your Lemmy feed?
You do understand that I am describing a whole different client, right?
There is no "Lemmy Feed", just "posts sent from individuals to a group" vs "posts sent from individuals that are broadcasting without any specific audience"
How this presentation layer would work would be entirely up to the developer/user. I can envision people that might prefer to have a separate threaded-view for group posts like we have in most forum sites, but I can also envision people that will prefer each post appearing in a "feed", like what Facebook does for groups. I can also envison such an application providing a "image gallery" for people tthat want to see only pictures, like Vernissage does.
My point is, it would be completely up to the user how to see the data.