Yup (on all points!):
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/nov/16/could-this-be-twitter-without-the-toxic-slurry-my-week-on-mastodon, by @zoesqwilliams
...& I still can't log in to the #mastodon site via (or somehow circumventing?) my qoto.org server...
@ThomasKupka @zoesqwilliams Why would you log on the Mastodon site (I gather you meant mastodon.social?) via Qoto? They're two seperate instances. You don't really need an account on each. You can communicate with people from mastodon.social already from Qoto.
@ThomasKupka @zoesqwilliams No, mastodon.social and qoto.org are not the same site. You log in via qoto.org and then you can have contact with people from mastodon.social. It is not an universal login system. It is a federated system.
Compare it with this:
If you create a Gmail account, can you log in Outlook with your Gmail login and password too? No, you can't.
But you sure can send an email to Outlook users from your Gmail account!
@trinsec @zoesqwilliams
Yep, I've got the 'federated system' thing, but thought that mastodon is the platform on which it's played (as the federal entity, as it were; or like a federal govt). So, if I want to use mastodon, I need an extra account there? That's not very comfortable...
@ThomasKupka @zoesqwilliams For the Fediverse network you'd need an account, yeah. But you can stick to one account there to contact everybody. I can follow someone from a Pixelfed instance or a Peertube instance right from this account. That's the ease of things.
You try following a Facebook account with a Twitter account.
@trinsec @zoesqwilliams
Yes, but isn't #mastodon the main site (1st pic)? I can't log in there w/ my qoto name & password (as the Guardian piece describes, too). I can only use qoto (2nd pic). But there's no way getting from there to Mastodon, it seems...