A quick primer on Mastadon for Twifugees:
Toot = Tweet
Boost = retweet
Hashtags work the same as in Twitter, but you can also put some hashtags in your profile so that you will show up when people search that hashtag even if you don't put it in every message you post necessarily.
The users of the Mastadon service are spread out over a number of individual but interconnected servers, called Instances. The largest Instance by far, with several hundred thousand accounts, is mastadon.social, but there are many other Instances (a few thousand different ones) with anything from tens of thousands to a couple dozen users, and anyone can host their own Instance if they're willing to pay the typical costs of hosting a server. Instances can be just general or they can be kind of based on a certain thing, like a broad interest category (i.e., "technology" or "gaming") or a geographic area. But regardless of what Instance your account is on, you can still see and find and follow users and toots from other Instances because Instances are all connected to each other, kind of like the hypergrid (it's called the "Fediverse"). Of course, if a particular Instance is known to be full of spam, toxic users, or whatnot, the admin(s) of other Instances can either shadow-ban or completely disable communication to and from the problem Instance and their own if they want. And obvs users can individually block anyone they want, too.
Apparently you CAN migrate or link an account (meaning mostly your followed and follower list) from one instance to another, although sadly for Free I think both Instances have to be up and running for you to do this (most give some forewarning if they intend to shut down, to allow users time to do this).
On your Mastodon page sidebar you will see (among other more intuitive things) Home, Local, and Federated links. It SEEMS to be the case that Home shows you a feed from the accounts you follow, Local shows you a feed limited to your particular instance, and Federated shows you a feed from the entire network. You probably wouldn't notice any real big difference in the content between your Local and Federated feeds if you belonged to say mastadon.social, but if your account was on another smaller instance like masthead.social which is a journalism-centric instance that only has about 13k users, your Local feed will just show people who belong to that instance, presumably talking mostly about journalism type stuff. So you could think of these three as kind of "levels" of filtering.
Because of tech magic, there's also allegedly a video-hosting service and a photosharing service that are not part of Mastodon but ARE part of the Fediverse and can interconnect with Mastodon, but I haven't researched that part very much yet.
www.theverge.com
techcrunch.com
mastodon.lol
