I recently discovered an interesting (and somewhat disappointing, as we’ll find later) fact. It may surprise you to hear that the two most upvoted comments on any Lemmy instance (that I could find at least) are both on Feddit.dk and are quite significantly higher than the next top comments.
The comments in question are:
- This one from @bstix@feddit.dk with a whopping 3661 upvotes.
- This one from @TDCN@feddit.dk with 1481 upvotes.
These upvote counts seems strange when you view them in relation to the post - both of the comments appear in posts that do not even have 300 upvotes.
Furthermore, if you go on any instance other than Feddit.dk and sort for the highest upvoted comments of all time, you will not find these comments (you’ll likely instead find this one from @Plume@lemmy.blahaj.zone).
Indeed, if you view the comments from another instance (here and here), you will see a much more “normal” upvote count: A modest 132 upvotes and a mere 17 upvotes, respectively.
What’s going on?
Well, the answer is Mastodon. Both of these comments somehow did very well in the Mastodon microblogging sphere. I checked my database and indeed, the first one has 3467 upvotes from Mastodon instances and the second one has 1442 upvotes from Mastodon instances.
Notice how both comments, despite being comments on another post, sound quite okay as posts in their own right. A Mastodon user stumbling upon one of these comments could easily assume that it is just another fully independent “toot” (Mastodon’s equivalent of tweet).
Someone from Mastodon must have “boosted” (retweeted) the comments and from there the ball started rolling - more and more people boosted, sharing the comments with their followers and more and more people favorited it. The favorites are Mastodon’s upvote equivalent and this is understood by Lemmy, so the upvote count on Lemmy also goes up.
Okay, so these comments got hugely popular on Mastodon (actually I don’t know if 3.4k upvotes is unusual on Mastodon with their scale but whatever), but why is there this discrepancy between the Lemmy instances then? Why is it only on Feddit.dk that the extra upvotes appear and they don’t appear on other instances?
The reason is the way that Mastodon federates Like objects (upvotes). Like objects are unfortunately only federated to the instance of the user receiving the Like, and that’s where the discrepancy comes from. All the Mastodon instances that upvoted the comments only sent those upvotes directly to Feddit.dk, so no other instances are aware of those upvotes.
This feels disappointing, as it highlights how Lemmy and Mastodon still don’t really function that well together. The idea of a Lemmy post getting big on Mastodon and therefore bigger on Lemmy and thus spreading all over the Fediverse, is unfortunately mostly a fantasy right now. It simply can’t really happen due to the technical way Mastodon and Lemmy function. I’m not sure if there is a way to address this on either side (or if the developers would be willing to do so even if there was).
I personally find Mastodon’s Like sharing mechanism weird - only sharing with the receiving instance means that big instances like mastodon.social have an advantage in “gathering Likes”. When sorting toots based on favorites, bigger instances are able to provide a much better feed for users than smaller instances ever could, simply because they see more of the Likes being given. This feels like something that encourages centralization, which is quite unfortunate I think.
TL;DR: The comments got hugely popular on Mastodon. Mastodon only federates upvotes to the receiving instance so only Feddit.dk has seen the Mastodon upvotes, and other instances are completely unaware.
It can work for other use cases Lemmy is proof of that. However, it’s not the main objective to be a federated Reddit.
Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, WordPress, Friendica, and Mobilzon all have different design considerations that are all equally valid. Some of the edge cases necessary to make Lemmy work well are unnecessary or even unwelcome for other designs (see: following Lemmy communities turning your timeline into an endless stream of boosted replies).
ActivityPub isn’t magic. It’s very deliberate in its push-based one-on-one entity relations (for performance reasons mostly). For social media, that works fine. The problem comes in when you get massive communities all posting in single threads, or people with thousands of followers that don’t know about each other rather than a friend group interacting with each other. Mastodon absolutely sucks for people with a large following; this isn’t something that’s unfixable, but fixes do need work and deliberation to work well.
I’d say ActivityPub works great for most social media. The biggest exception may be chat (DMs are footguns that work almost accidentally) and ranked-score forums like Reddit, which require a lot more post-processing than other social media protocols.
It should also be said that both Lemmy and Mastodon use the ActivityPub spec mostly correctly (neither is fully spec compliant as far as I know), despite using different mechanisms to achieve the same goal that aren’t always compatible. We can barely get chat apps to interoperate, it’s impressive how well ActivityPub has proven to be.
I don’t think the situation would be very different had Lemmy been based on ATProto or Nostr. Reddit is a bit of an odd duck in the social media landscape, and very few other websites share its core patterns and algorithms.