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Tails: A Place on Lemmy for Mastodon Posts

Given the shared underlying protocol, I didn't like that if I saw something interesting on Mastodon, and wanted to post it on Lemmy, I'd have to screenshot it and/or re-attribute it to me rather than the original author.

Tails is an experimental community. Instead of announcing just what a Lemmy user has posted, it announces what a Fediverse actor has posted. This means that, so far, it's featured posts from Mastodon accounts like Mr Lovenstein, warsandpeas, George Takei, Low Quality Facts, and other interesting people. Lemmy users have been able to reply to the author, and have also replied to those other Mastodon accounts that responded.

You can see for yourself at !tails

(the usual rules apply: if you're the first person on your instance to do this, you'll likely get a blank screen or an error. Wait 10 secs or so, press refresh, and you should have it).

Pixel ,

Hi, I'm new to some of this stuff and I'm a little confused. How does it decide which mastodon posts to include? Are you deciding that or can anyone do it?

freamon OP ,

It's me deciding. Recommendations for interesting people on Mastodon to follow are welcome (either in this post, or the sticky 'About this community' post).

MBM ,

Really love that this is a thing. Also, not sure where to best report this, but I've noticed that it doesn't show all Mastodon comments, and replies to Lemmy comments don't make it over to Mastodon

freamon OP ,

Mmmm. It's the instance that people are on on that's doing (or not doing) much of the work there. If you comment on a post, the instance will send 1 copy to me (who's responsible for federating it out to other Lemmy instances) and 1 copy to Mastodon for the post's author.

If you reply to a Lemmy comment, it doesn't send it to Mastodon because it's not for the author (in much the same way that you don't get replies to replies in your inbox if you're the OP of a Lemmy post). For local posts, both Mastodon and Lemmy show the local comment tree, but neither can show every Fediverse interaction because they never hear about them.

Likewise, if you reply to a Mastodon comment, your instance will send it to the comment author, but not the post author, so won't appear anywhere under their post.

As for Mastodon comments on Lemmy ... it depends. I follow some accounts, so when I post them to Lemmy, top-level comments come through automatically (again, though, I never hear about replies to replies). Other content is just stuff I've seen and grabbed. I often post the existing replies, but not if they've turned Authorized Fetch on, and I don't typically go back and check for more later.

livus ,
@livus@kbin.social avatar

Cool!

@freamon can mastodon users not normally see when we tag them on lemmy? They can on kbin.

freamon OP ,

They can, yes. The lemmy instance that a particular user is on handles that. This community is mostly about getting the posts and comments into lemmy in the first place.

livus ,
@livus@kbin.social avatar

@freamon I get it. That's something I like about kbin, the "microblogs" sections are all mastodon content.

Jake_Farm ,
@Jake_Farm@sopuli.xyz avatar

Tails? Like the Tor operating system?

freamon OP ,

Lol, no. I've decided that they should be exclusively referred to as Tails OS (they've yet to formally agree).

The name comes it being a Community that follows People (so flipping the usual relationship in a heads/tails kinda way, but also tail as a synonym for follow).

Jake_Farm ,
@Jake_Farm@sopuli.xyz avatar

I mean it's a bit of a stretch.

THE_MASTERMIND ,

Not bit it's a very big stretch

LunchEnjoyer ,

Must admit, I too instantly thought this was about the Operating System... Nice idea though, I'm in 🌻

Die4Ever ,
@Die4Ever@programming.dev avatar

Is this open source?

freamon OP ,

Not yet, no.

Annoyed_Crabby ,

George Takei, the one that dress as futuristic japanese emperor and insult millions of people by telling how stupid they are, is on Mastodon?

Subbed.

CanadaPlus ,

Neat! Subbed.

spiritedpause ,

Great concept! Btw in addition to this, if you post something on Mastodon and tag the lemmy community in the post, it posts it to Lemmy directly.

freamon OP ,

I've seen this happen occasionally, but it doesn't always look great, and relies on them having heard of Lemmy in the first place, obvs.

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