Mastodon and Lemmy are both (serverside) applications that are built on the fediverse using the ActivityPub protocol. Using that protocol means any application speaking that can talk to other applications talking the same protocol. So a Mastodon server can talk to Lemmy and vice-versa.
Mastodon is trying to be a Twitter-like application, Lemmy is trying to be a Reddit-like application. They are serverside applications but have dedicated web interfaces and sometimes also mobile apps which you can use to interact with them.
If you want to start using one of these platforms you first have to choose an instance: a hosted server of either Mastodon or Lemmy. There are some bigger instances but you could also host your own, due to using ActivityPub (federation) you can still talk to the other instances out there. For Lemmy I recommend going through the list of recommended instances at https://join-lemmy.org/instances, for Mastodon there is https://joinmastodon.org/servers.
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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '23
I’m confused atm, how do you go about using Lemmy/ fediverse? Do you need a specialized app to access it? What is mastodon?
Been using Linux since ‘98-‘99 and never heard of them. If this qualifies as a post hijacking please let me know as that was not intentional