I created accounts on Lemmy and Mastodon, thinking to replace both reddit and Twitter, but I’m able to see my Lemmy account and its posts by searching on Mastodon. However I’m not able to log in to the Mastodon app with my Lemmy username.
The apps for Lemmy are still super new and not very reliable- is there any chance of being able to browse and post on Lemmy servers using the Mastodon app instead?
Lemmy and Mastodon servers are capable of speaking to each other using the ActivityPub protocol, but they present substantially different APIs and user interfaces to the end user. There is no way to use a Lemmy app to log in to a Mastodon instance, or vice versa.
They have a completely different UI, so I don’t think that’s likely, but I might be wrong.
Accounts are local to the instance they are created on, so unless Lemmy provides an API the mastodon client can talk to (which AFAIK it doesn’t) you can’t use one client with a different server. Posts and other things (likes, videos, images, comments, etc) are federated between instances so you will be able to see posts. How the different apps (Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, etc) interpret and choose to display those, as well as how they interact with those (e.g. allowing you to comment on a comment vs only on a post) vary across the different offerings.
That’s not supported at the moment I’m afraid. The features of Lemmy and Mastodon have an overlap, but differ in meaningful ways, e.g. you can’t downvote from Mastodon (apps).
Lemmy is still in the early stages of development and I’m sure the app-ecosystem will improve!
