Hey 👋 if you don’t know us already, we’re building Frontpage; an AT Procol based federated link aggregator. We shipped an initial MVP in closed beta recently and have since been thinking about the road to general availability.
This post is an RFC (Request for Comments) targeted at technically minded folks who are interested in seeing the progression of atproto for non-Bluesky/microblogging use cases. All that’s to say the language that follows assumes some knowledge about how Bluesky and atproto work! I’ve tried to include links to explain what all of the jargon means though, so hopefully it’s not entirely nonsense for folks a little less familiar!
When you post on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror post will also be created in your Bluesky account. When you comment on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror reply will be created in your Bluesky account.
Conversely, when you reply to one of these mirrored posts in Bluesky - we will show it as a reply in Frontpage.
Additionally, Bluesky likes will be translated to Frontpage votes and vice versa.
I don’t think automatic crossposting is a good idea. However some way to “boost” Mastodon posts onto Lemmy would be good. Mbin has a way of boosting but can’t assign a magazine. Something like that may work though. Mastodon can already boost Lemmy posts.
I think support for boosts is a game changer for interoperability. As a Mastodon user I wouldn’t really want to follow a community even if it was well implemented, but I’m happy to follow users who boost content I’m interested in.
Boosting content is the way posts spread on Mastodon. If anyone follows me from Mastodon they will see all the content I boost; if they enjoy it, they might re-boost to their followers and the ball starts rolling. And that’s how you suddenly get comment sections where Mastodon users are actively participating.
I’ve found that, currently, this kind of works and kind of doesn’t. I’ve boosted a few lemmy and mbin comments from my Mastodon account, and it shows up in feeds just like you would expect it to. Unfortunately, the parent post of the thread only shows as a link to the lemmy/mbin thread, rather than showing the full text of the original post. So it’s hard for people to see the context of the comment.
Mastodon appears to see lemmyverse comments the same way it sees Mastodon comments, but the top-level post that started the thread is somehow different.
Yeah, it works better for comments than for actual posts for sure. And then they need to work outside of context and all that.
I think sharing of posts might be better suited for quote posts, if that’s ever integrated.
I’m hoping that this will “just work” when Mastodon gets quite-posting. You could take a Mastodon post, and then quote-post it into a community by mentioning that community’s name.
This would create a separate thread of replies, which is good. A person shouldn’t be able to suddenly thrust a bunch of community replies onto someone else’s post. So basically it’s what quote-posting is for, but sharing it with a community instead of just your own followers.