EnbySpacePerson

Mastodon folks are often unaware of the different types of software federating over the Activity Pub protocol. It's not just Microblogs emulating what Twitter was. One of the areas is Discussion Forums like Reddit but federated. This includes Lemmy and Kbin. Because the focus isn't on microblogging, these platforms can offer feature sets that are beneficial for more nuanced discussion. What you may not know is that you can interact with discussions on federated discussion forums from your Mastodon account.

This isn't a comprehensive guide. It's not intended to be one. It's just some basics you need to get started with a bit of an explanation as to why you'd want to.

About

If you're familiar with federated microblogging software (such as Mastodon) but not familiar with discussion forum software (like Reddit), Lemmy and the other federated discussion forum software are a whole new world.

On Mastodon particularly, you're probably accustomed to only seeing parts of conversations. Posts are usually pretty short. If they need to be longer, they become a thread. If it's not a thread originating from your server, some other people's responses likely won't show up. To see everything, you end up opening a lot of new tabs.

When you're working from a federated discussion forum platform, you'll only miss parts when moderators have taken action against posts (or posters).

Each discussion forum post exists in a context. For example, it might be in a Star Trek themed community. That means it's mostly not going to get interactions from people who hate Star Trek. Moderators for that community will take action on the rules for their community rather than just the instance rules. Most instances support downvotes so there are consequences for negative behavior.

A lot of the types of posts that seem to draw hostile behavior on the federated microblogs are going to have better interactions when shared in federated Discussion Forums instead. Post length limits are (on average) longer, allowing for more nuanced conversations. Because it's truly threaded, it's more clear when someone is responding to someone else's remarks rather than OP's remarks.

None of that means you should get rid of your Mastodon account(s). Discussion Forums excel at topic-based chat. Maybe news, hobby, in-depth political discussions, or jokes. You're probably not going to want to talk about your day-to-day life there, though.

Communities

Communities are the core of the discussion forum world. In Reddit parlance, they're like subreddits. In some ways, they're similar to subforums on the computer forums of old. They tend to cover a particular topic.

Because of communities, there's less importance in federated forum sites on which site you join. The main thing you'll interact with are communities (called Magazines in Kbin). They're hosted on whichever instance they began on but you can interact with them just like they were on your local instance.

This distinction is extremely cool for people with an existing Microblog style account. You can use your existing account to respond to threads ... once you know how to do it. It's not obvious how to get there. I'll talk about it more in the how to section.

Moderation

As with Reddit, communities are generally moderated by the moderators of the community itself. If the moderators don't follow the rules of the instance that hosts them, the instance administrators and admins may step in to handle a situation.

The bottom of the community's sidebar will list the moderators of the community.

How to

Get started from Mastodon or other Microblog instance

While you can usually get from Mastodon to a specific post or thread by using search with the link, in my experience, you'll have a better time interacting with discussion forum posts if you first follow the community. That will cause the posts and threads to federate to your instance and let you interact with them.

If you've played with, say, BookWyrm and found that you can't follow your BookWyrm account from your Microblog account, you may experience issues replying to discussion forum posts. I don't know what causes that. The admin for your Microblog instance may have better insights into that problem.

With that in mind ... to follow a community from your Microblog account:

1. Find the community address in the sidebar of the community.

   • It may look like tenforward@lemmy.world or it might look like !tenforward@lemmy.world.

   

   • Note: PieFed doesn't provide this information in that location. You can find the same information in the breadcrumbs instead.

   

2. If present, remove the ! from the address and replace it with an @

   • Continuing with the tenforward example, the resulting address would be @tenforward@lemmy.world

3. Paste the modified address into your instance's search and select profiles matching <pasted_address> from the list
   @tenforward@lemmy.world entered into the field" />

4. Click the Follow button

   • If you see more than one “account,” follow the one that has the correct top level domain.
   • In this example, you would follow the one whose address starts with https://lemmy.world

   

If you're using Mastodon or another microblog which supports lists, I recommend adding the community to a list. Preferably one set to keep its members posts out of your main feed. It makes the experience much more manageable. Otherwise, you just have a bunch of seemingly random posts going into your main feed and you have to click on each one to get the context.

Interacting with discussion forum posts from a Microblog

From, say, Mastodon or Sharkey, the start of a conversation has a heading and a link to a Lemmy post. It looks like it's linking to itself. You'll need to open the link in a new tab to see the actual content of a post. It could have images attached, body text, and a link.

It's bad form to pretend that the title of a post is the only thing you need to know in order to respond to it.

The “account” for the community will appear to reblog / boost / renote each reply received to that conversation. That way, you will see each post even if your instance isn't specifically federating with the instance where the response came from. This is a huge improvement conversationally.

To respond to the thread in your microblog feed, hit the reply button and make your reply. Your microblog software will add the handle for the person who made the post (like @person@domain.tld). You'll want to take that out. Same thing if you're replying to someone else's reply. It won't stop the message from going through if you include it. It just looks weird if you're @ing the person or people you're replying to.

Can I make my own post?

Yes. Or at least I've been told so. I'm a little uncomfortable giving you instructions on something I haven't done myself yet. I'm not going to make a post just for the purpose of testing this.

1. Start a new toot (not in response to an existing toot).
2. The first line in the post will become the headline or title for the forum post.
   
   • The community may have rules about what to put in a headline or title. Make sure you follow the community rules here and throughout your post.
3. The next lines become the body of the post.
   
   • You can include links and attachments.
4. Somewhere in the post, you need to @ mention the community. If you don't, the software will have no way to know you intend to create a post.

Some caveats

You need to be cognizant of the rules of the community you're posting on. The rules for the community will be visible in the sidebar. Some communities may be hosted on instances with rules you might find quirky. Information about the instance is located in the sidebar below the community rules. These two sidebars together will generally include the basic rules you need to be aware of before responding to a post.

If you're on an instance with a 500 character limit and no post formatting, you're going to be frustrated pretty quickly trying to interact from a microblog to a forum. 500 characters is a pretty paltry limit for a nuanced discussion. While post formatting isn't an absolute necessity, it's kind of annoying to live without it when everyone else has it.

Conclusion

Interacting with Discussion Forums from a microblog is possible. It's not too hard. It's a lot less pleasant an experience than getting your own discussion forum account. In the process of working on this essay, I got my own Lemmy account. It's definitely a better way to interact with communities hosted in the Discussion Forums.

You can get some of the advantages of Lemmy without leaving your microblog, though.

I found some additional information and wrote about it before realizing it wasn't really on topic for this post. I included it under Extra information but you've officially read the entire article at this point.

Extra information

Blocked sites

At the bottom of the page, between Modlog and Docs, you'll find the Instances link. You can also append /instances to the site's address. Instances lets you see information about which sites an instance federates with and insances it blocks. Each site's blocks are set by the sites themselves. Some of the blocked instances will likely already be familiar if you've been on Mastodon or the Fediverse for a while.

At the moment, if your microblogging server doesn't have a discussion forum instance blocked, you'll be able to respond to conversations on Lemmy / etc. However, if you make a regular post from a microblog that doesn't respond to an existing thread on a discussion forum or create a new discussion forum thread, servers won't see your post on Lemmy at least. (The situation is a little different for Kbin.)

For administrators of microblog instances, that means it's not as critical for you to be aware of nasty forum sites.