Can somebody ELI5 what the difference is between Lemmy and Mastodon? Is it just a different front-end to the same thing?
They are different platforms that can communicate with each other, and whose users can interact with, follow, and reply to each other. Mastodon is a microblogging service like Twitter, where everything is a short text post, and Lemmy is more of a link sharing/aggregation service where you can post links or text and others can comment on them. As far as I know, Mastodon users can comment on Lemmy posts, but their ability to post directly to Lemmy communities may be limited due to the platforms having a different feature set.
@f00fc7c8 It’s because Lemmy requires a headline for posts to a community. With Mastodon, unfortunately, you can not create headings, so you can only comment from Mastodon.
I see, so you can view Lemmy posts and comment from Mastodon, but cannot view Mastodon posts and comment from Lemmy?
Very good piece, I must say.