Hey Stephen, welcome to the fediverse!
Mastodon works pretty similarly to Twitter, in the sense that you’re microblogging. The biggest difference is that you can follow people who are on other servers - I’m writing to you from my instance at social.deadsuperhero.com, but both of us are experiencing this interaction as though we are in the same place.
Think of it like blog syndication, like RSS, but your subscribers can reply back to you, and you can see what they have to say.
One really big tip: the search bar on your Mastodon dashboard can be used to pull in remote things. People do this for two use-cases:
You can copy and paste any URL to a post on the fediverse, and throw it into your search bar. Your server will pull it in and focus on it, so that you can interact with it.
Every user has what is called a “handle”, which looks a bit like an email address. The format is user@domain.tld. In my case, my handle is sean@social.deadsuperhero.com. Every profile has this thing on it - you can throw that into your search bar, and it will pull up my profile. It’s a very easy way to follow people. In the few edge cases where it fails to load, you can pull in a post instead, then click on their avatar to load the profile manually.
