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!
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.
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.
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.
Same - I just track my accounts in my KeePass, so it’s not too bad. I have way too many accounts anyway, and I don’t trust Google/Microsoft to keep them safe in the long term, so KeePass it is.
Separate seems smart. Interacting from Lemmy to Mastodon and vice-versa isn’t exactly the most user friendly experience, since neither platform was really built with those type of interactions in mind.
Perhaps in future it’ll be more seamless.
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.
Because they’re all different applications. I think the confusion here is between ActivityPub the protocol, and the applications that actually use it. The applications that use AP to federate are all different, they have different data structures, hell mastodon and Lemmy/kbin are completely different at a conceptual level. They just communicate with each other via AP, but once they receive the AP message they convert it into their own data structures and concepts. And you should note that AP is technically a communications protocol, it doesn’t prescribe how stuff should be stored or sorted after an object is communicated between two servers and doesn’t really prescribe a way to browse through the historical activities of a person. These are things implemented by the application you’re using. So it’s not like you could just write an app that combs through all that data available on the fediverse, you’d need an instance that federates with all these places, then an app that uses that instance. Technically feasible but so far nobody’s done it yet, but you can see how some people reply to threads on Lemmy via Mastodon.
Memmy (and wefwef) is for lemmy instances only, while kbin can access both lemmy and mastodon communities.
@toasteranimation when kbin finally gets apps, will I be able to log into them with my mastodon account but see the “correct” ui for lemmy and kbin?
