I'm fairly new to the fediverse, but my understanding is that different platforms are supposed to be able to share content between them. I have always hated most social media and reddit was the only one whose layout I could stand, so my favorite fediverse platform is Lemmy. I do have a mastodon account but if I can get the same content here I'd rather just delete it and use a platform I like. Is that how it works? If so how do I do that/know when I'm doing it?
the fediverse is designed to guard against the same kind of enshitification that reddit went into by keeping the same discourse alive everywhere regardless whether you use mastodon or lemmy or any other social media platform.
social media tribalism guarantees eventual enshitification of some kind, so keeping your options open makes sense should you ever decide to set sail on the fediverse sea after the people on your platform island have burned it all down due to the local culture war they insisted on fighting until its pointless end.
i've been switching from one social media platform to another since the 1990's because of enshitification and that's taught me that the platforms with investors behind it enshitify the in the worse ways possible (eg reddit, facebook, bluesky, etc.). so i think that the fediverse has the biggest and likeliest chance to survive all enshitification because of how it's designed to keep the discourse alive no matter how many power tripping mods or majority conversation shaping admins there are. (at least for now).
I'm not sure about all the same content, but you can see at least some Mastadon content and comments on Lemmy and vice versa. You'll recognize them as they use a lot of #tags and will @ the user they are replying to, which have little use on Lemmy.
You could try creating an account on kbin/mbin instead of lemmy, my understanding is that that gives you the "threadiverse" and the microblogging fediverse on one platform, though I have not tried it yet.
On Lemmy you can only follow communities, not individuals.
What do you mean? The post is about using Lemmy to view mastodon stuff so I don't have to use anything else. It's not just about using Lemmy, it's about only using Lemmy.
@Unknown1234_5 It is possible to post to Lemmy from Mastodon by tagging a community, to follow a Lemmy community from Mastodon, and to comment on Lemmy posts from Mastodon even if you're not following the community by pasting its URL into the Mastodon search bar. I'm doing that here for demonstration purposes.
It is not possible to follow users on Lemmy, which is the main interaction model of Mastodon.
If you want to actively participate in both microblogging and community-based discussion, it's best to use both Mastodon and Lemmy (or your favorite alternative to each).