Fediverse

Mastodon is microblogging. As others have said, it's similar to Twitter. Lemmy is a link aggregator with a comments/conversation section per link, like Slashdot, Digg or Reddit.

I think the thing that people forget to do with Mastodon is to follow hashtags. The feature wasn't there early on but it's been there for probably a year or more now. Then you block or mute the accounts you don't want to see that post under those tags.

It's a useful substitute for following accounts when you have no idea which accounts to follow. You can then curate and actually follow accounts whose content outside those hashtags also catches your eye.

On the link aggregators there are the groups which don't exist on Mastodon, but that's what hashtags are for, right? Marking the topic.

The only hard part about it for me is feeling bad about blocking innocent accounts.

Also worth mentioning is that Mbin instances exist, and that software is basically both Lemmy and Mastodon rolled into one site. The posts aren't fully integrated though. You have to click something to view the microblog side of things and click something to go back.

Lemmy is like reddit and Mastodon is like Twitter.

You mostly understood it right.

I think of Mastodon/Twitter as essentially server-side RSS readers: you follow the sources you want to read, then are notified when they are posting something. If you don't already have any followers, there is little point in posting anything there. The forum-like structure of Lemmy is a lot more suited for ordinary people to discuss topics they are interested in.

Yes, Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and all its other niche platforms are very much person based. They can still be topical, based on who that person is and what they post, but they have this self-centered drive that never made me click with any of them. Hashtags help with discovery since you can search and even subscribe / follow certain hashtags, or use them to block / filter certain topics. But there's also often people who abuse that and just spam hashtags, or people who don't tag their posts properly, which makes it a very flawed system imo.

Forums, Reddit, Lemmy, mbin (excluding the microblogging section), etc. are all topic based, and users are just contributing to those topics but ultimately not important as the person. That being said, some also allow you to follow the people directly as well, but at least for me that's never been much of a thing.

There's people who want to follow other people because you can follow specific associations, independent journalists, etc. If you are like that Mastodon will help with that but if you prefer broader topics no matter the source you have Lemmy. This are two distinct social media which belong to two distinct groups as other mentioned like microblogging and a more standard forum.

I prefer Lemmy because I like to follow topics and I get more involved in the discussions but sometimes I want to check on someone and the best way is to go to a Mastodon like platform.

I mean you don't need to use each social media every day, some will fit more your personality and you will use that more but that doesn't mean you can't open the other one from time to time.

mastodon is essentially 'twitter'. also called 'microblogging'. people post things that other people can see because they subscribe to 'people'

the hashtags are supposed to be used to aggregate posts between all those different people to help find common posts.

lemmy does none of it, as it is not capable of 'microblogging'

there are a few platforms that can do both the 'forum based' stuff (threadiverse) and the 'twitter based stuff' (microblog) like mbin

on my instance for example, you can follow people on mastodon and interact with all the lemmy content

You can just follow hashtags instead of users on Mastodon. In fact I think that's the best way to use it.

You can also subscribe to a hashtag via RSS, which is really useful.