I think I joined the Fediverse misunderstanding how it works. I went in under the belief that:

• Under the hood, everything is an ActivityPub post
• Lemmy, Mastodon, PixelFed, and PeerTube are “interfaces” or “views” for the underlying ActivityPub post
• All 4 can interact with eachother
• I only need 1 account

For the last point I found out that the answer is “yes…but actually no.”

Based on the “ActivityPub Magic” thread (or Mastodon Post?), I see that Mastodon users can reply to the Lemmy thread (with some limitations) and follow Communities. Cool.

I see a Lemmy thread and a Mastodon post as serving 2 different purposes. Sometimes they overlap. But maybe I want to post something on my Mastodon timeline just for something general going on in my life that I don’t necessarily want to post into a Lemmy community. Now let’s say I started with a Lemmy account.

Unless I’m wrong, the only way to make that post would be to make a Mastodon account that’s seperate from my existing Lemmy account.

I thought part of the beauty of the Fediverse was that someone could be following “me” and choose whatever “interface” they want. Instead it looks like they would be following “me@Lemmy”, “me@Mastodon”, “me@PixelFed”, and “me@PeerTube”.

And then there’s the whole defederation of instances maybe requiring multiple accounts, but that’s another topic. Now, to be clear I do see the use case of having multiple accounts for different instances (e.g. having a furry account and a general one).

Is there a roadmap for “merging” accounts between platforms? I understand that question might be more towards Lemmy/Mastodon/etc. developers than server admins, but just seeing if anyone here knows.