Yea - the thing is that it's called "AskLemmy" when really the whole Fediverse can access the community. I feel like it would've been better suited to call it "AskFedi" or something else. In general it doesn't really make sense to use the software as the name for stuff.
People here say "lemmy" way too much when they really should consider the Fediverse as a whole.
EDIT: Curious why people are down voting, anyone care to explain their perspective on this?
Part of it is that we don’t federate that nicely to the rest of the fediverse yet
I mean, kinda? But it federates well enough I would say. I regularly see Mastodon or kbin users and I feel it's not fair to those users to refer to the spaces on Lemmy instances as "lemmy". And as you note, it's short sighted - Lemmy might not be around in 10 years and some other implementation might take over.
But tbf I'm not sure exactly what the federation problems are right now. I'm not sure how Lemmy could federate better (if at all).
Yea it's really about what people have as the mental model for the platform they are on. It might take time for people to internalize what the network is doing.
Mastodon and Lemmy do mix as it is, but it could be better. Two big areas I've heard are
Lemmy users need the ability to follow mastodon users (kbin has this I believe)
Mastodon users have a hard time following Lemmy communities and seeing posts, because they end up getting a waterfall of every post/comment at once overwhelming their feeds
First part is definitely lemmy but I don't mind it that much tbh. It feels like it should be possible to post on your own profile (not on any community) and then you'd see posts from users you subscribe to just like you see posts from communities. I think reddit actually has this functionality.
The second point sounds more like something mastodon should fix. Like not including every reply in the feed or something, I don't know.
Because those spaces are just as accessible from other instances that may not use Lemmy. They're not on "Lemmy", they're on the underlying protocol, i.e. ActivityPub, which is the major part of the fediverse.
It'd be like if you had an Outlook email and instead of referring to it as your email, you refer to it as your Outlook, even though other email implementations can just as easily talk to you. Outlook is just an email implementation, it's not what email is. That's the protocol.
I will always call this type of discussion forum “reddit”. This format, with upvotes, downvotes, nested replies, and collapsible descendants, is reddit