this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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I’m not sure if this is the wrong place to post this; my apologies if it’s not.

Anyway, I have an inquiry about Mastodon replies seeming to not post to show up on Lemmy.

Earlier today I made a post on Mastodon and made it post to Lemmy as well, by @ing the community I wanted it to appear in. Here’s a link to the post on Mastodon, and here’s how it showed up on Lemmy. At first, everything seemed to work fine.

But something I noticed is that, though the Lemmy comments were visible to me on Mastodon, the reverse was not true: most of the Mastodon replies were not visible on Lemmy. So there seems to have been some federation issues there.

So my question is, does anyone know what caused this and if so how I can fix it?

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[–] pseudo@jlai.lu 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

though the Lemmy comments were visible to me on Mastodon, the reverse was not true: most of the Mastodon replies were not visible on Lemmy.

Yeah... That's a common fédération issue. I haven't properly investigated but a hypothesis might be that the account that commented are on instances not federating with the Lemmy instance.

Here a community for you to do more test : !testfediverse@jlai.lu

[–] a_gee_dizzle@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago

Here a community for you to do more test : !testfediverse@jlai.lu

This is a useful too, thank you

[–] julian@activitypub.space 9 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (3 children)

> @a_gee_dizzle@lemmy.ca said in Mastodon not federating to Lemmy?: > > So my question is, does anyone know what caused this and if so how I can fix it?

Mastodon doesn't know to send replies to the community for distribution to the rest of the threadiverse.

Long story short if you're not on the same instance as the community, Mastodon replies to you won't make it to the rest of the threadiverse.

I experimented with a hack to see if I could fix this. NodeBB works around this by including a hidden mention to the community that Mastodon will then pre-fill in the text box, and then the reply will make it in successfully. If you have a Mastodon account try to reply to this comment, the community will be pre-filled as a mention.

Piefed, Lemmy, and Mbin will need to do this.

Does it work? Yes

Are we supposed do it? Technically no, it's easier to blame Mastodon for not doing it right.

Should we do it? Probably, yes.


@rimu@piefed.social @nutomic@lemmy.ml @bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de @melroy@mastodon.melroy.org I tested this. It works perfectly fine. We can implement this today and remove it when Mastodon supports threadiverse conversations better (I'll try to make that happen.)

[–] pseudo@jlai.lu 1 points 6 hours ago

Long story short if you’re not on the same instance as the community, Mastodon replies to you won’t make it to the rest of the threadiverse.

Oh... That explains a lot of. Thank you for sharing the cause and the solution (^_^)

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)
[–] liaizon@social.wake.st 1 points 6 hours ago

@nutomic @julian oh wow thats great to hear. Gotta love a hack

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 14 hours ago

Sounds good to me!

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 13 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

unless somethin new has happened, lemmy doesnt fully federate to mastodon/the twitterverse. interaction is very limited.

its one of the reasons i use mbin instead of lemmy

[–] a_gee_dizzle@lemmy.ca 0 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

If I had made this post on kbin would the lemmy and mastodon users have been able to interact with one another?

[–] julian@activitypub.space 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Theoretically yes.

Practically, only sometimes. Mastodon doesn't know to send the reply to the community (or even just a user from that community), so when replies are made that don't include the community, then they don't get make it through to the threadiverse.

Mastodon users (if they're following the community) will get everything, but the UI for reading threadiverse content is abysmal 😝

[–] a_gee_dizzle@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago

Haha okay. Thanks for the info!

[–] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

It's more likely that the instance hosting the community would make the most difference. Try a PieFed community if you're interested.

[–] a_gee_dizzle@lemmy.ca 0 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (2 children)

I always an avid user of piefed.ca but I had to quit because most of my comments weren’t federating anymore due to some corrupted data issue

Edit: misread your comment. You jut mean posting to the community. Gotchu

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 1 points 11 hours ago

The federating issues were solved iirc

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 11 hours ago

Afaik it's fixed now 😊

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

lemmy does not federate with mastodon/the twitterverse..

i believe there is a one-way mechanism for twitterverse posts to be used an inbound content stream for lemmy (like rss ) but thats it... one direction.

i dont think theres anything you can do to make that happen short of some janky bridge.

i subscribe to lots of peeps from the twitterverse.. i can reply to/comment on posts, see other comments, upvote/boost, etc.. kbin is dead long live mbin.

[–] a_gee_dizzle@lemmy.ca 1 points 17 hours ago

i believe there is a one-way mechanism for twitterverse posts to be used an inbound content stream for lemmy (like rss ) but thats it... one direction.

The Lemmy posts were showing up as replies to my Mastodon post. And some of the Mastodon replies were showing up in Lemmy. So it does seem to go both ways, its just inconsistent

[–] hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

If you use Misskey or whatever it calls itself now, it works well with Mastodon and okay with Lemmy.

[–] a_gee_dizzle@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago

If I had posted this on Miskey would that have allowed Lemmy users and Mastodon users to interact?

[–] mistermodal@lemmy.ml 1 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

It's pretty inconsistent, depends on what the people running the site are doing. Seems like the Palestine comm and other stuff that is really consistently popular on both sides for years is what works reliably. Plus it depends on Mastodon fork. Misskey would have no problem federating with Lemmy if not for one tiny bug, but the forks like Sharkey and Iceshrimp already solved that. It's just that nobody except for me and like 37 other people know they exist.

You mentioned K/Mbin and I honestly find it a bit distasteful, as representing what should really be the same kind of post-reply format (the retweet accounts represent comms or rss feeds etc perfectly, I even use them for scraping imageboards and Telegram, these sites may have different UI but they're almost the same format) in a whole separate thing just feels really clunky and the magazines are weird—sorry if that makes you mad because it really fits your workflow. Wish there was just more basic consistency between the platforms since users could share information regardless of whether they have Twitter or Reddit brain 😁

Mainly I wish stuff like a.gup .pe worked better *lmao this already shut down nevermind RIP it was basically a platform-agnostic way to create groups similar to lemmy's communities, and they appeared on here that way