@hedge Right now, most Fediverse projects are analogies of their centralized counterparts, albeit with some differences (e.g. you can add a title to Friendica posts, but not on the Facebook ones. You can add inline media to Friendica posts and comments, on Facebook you can’t etc.), so you can take that in a way. A short answer to your question would be the one in the first comment of the post:

Interaction between Lemmy and Mastodon doesn’t work well because the two services structure their content differently. Lemmy is community based and Mastodon is user based. Lemmy doesn’t have a mechanism to follow an individual user, and Mastodon doesn’t have an analog to communities (afaik).

With the addition that you can follow Fediverse groups on Mastodon, but you cannot create Fediverse groups on Mastodon (as Mastodon itself doesn’t have any group feature). If you’re not looking into creating and admining groups yourself, then you can safely consider Mastodon. Otherwise, you can pick Friendica, Kbin, Mbin or Hubzilla (among others). In fact, this is how I see this very post on Friendica.

Also, btw, Pixelfed is also adding support for groups.

@morgunkorn

ActivityPub is so loosely designed (in my opinion as somewhat of an outsider) that the opportunity was squandered to be able to have all different services interact smoothly with each other. It’s basically one little fiefdom per app, and if Pixelfed wants to make itself compatible with Mastodon’s fiefdom, then fine, and likewise for Mbin with Lemmy and etc, but it’s not really “cross compatible” between the whole universe of apps, in the same way as other better-designed protocols like email work, where it’s just “email” with no app specificity to it. It is a shame and a missed opportunity with how the protocol was designed, I think.

I think in general, the fediverse people are working on solutions, but we’re sort of stuck into the present setup which has this not really ideal compartmentalization and there’s not a good way to fix it. Certainly not from the Lemmy side that I’m aware of. Two possibilities though:

• Pixelfed has in-progress work on groups support, which is apparently very close to reality and at which point it should be able to interoperate with both Mastodon and Lemmy, which are the two main fiefdoms at present. And, Dan seems like he takes it pretty seriously the idea of maintaining compatibility all around (incl specifically with Lemmy).
• You can do kbin/mbin, which is more “Lemmy like” and is the best currently-working option I’m aware of for interoperating with Mastodon and Lemmy both (incl following Mrs. Hedge on Pixelfed and also any Lemmy communities). That’s why I am using mbin currently FWIW.