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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what you mean. I'm on Friendica, and I can follow, reshare and comment on posts from people on other platforms with no problem. I don't need accounts on other servers for this, though I'm sure my interaction with them is limited to whatever Friendica supports. I don't doubt you can do more if you actually get accounts on different systems, but that's a choice you have. I don't think you need to do it if you don't want to.

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Follow and comment are the only things that are supported across platforms. That is what I mean by "exchanging at a basic level". To use any of the various features that makes the various applications worthwhile, you have to go create an account in that application and subscribe to people's accounts from there.

When Gitea implements federated merge requests and tickets, you will be able to follow repositories from Mastodon and comment on issues from there. That's great! But to do anything else (create/assign/close issues, open/review merge requests, ...) you will have to create a separate Gitea account and use it to interact with Gitea users. This is a serious limit to "interacting with a whole diverse universe".

But you can't post a video to Peertube or start a thread on Lemmy. There's a level of interoperability that was envisioned for the fediverse that we're missing right now. If you post a video, Peertube users won't see it despite being the fediverse's main video software. If you post a link with your commentary, Lemmy users won't see it despite being link sharing software.

The microblogging platforms ingest most types of posts from the other activitypub softwares, but the other platforms don't ingest posts from the (micro)blogging platforms. With the client-to-server API, the other platforms would just be clients on top of your Friendica account.

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