1. You can either run it yourself or find an instance run by someone else (e.g. my flagship instance mastodon.social). This is similar in principle to GNU socia

1. You can either run it yourself or find an instance run by someone else (e.g. my flagship instance mastodon.social). This is similar in principle to GNU social, Diaspora and XMPP. 2. Users belong to a certain instance and can be addressed like username@domain. You can follow any user from any instance and you will receive their posts, you can interact with them just like if they'd be on your own instance (replies, mentions, reblogs, favourites, etc). On the technical side, this is accomplished with OStatus, Atom feeds/ActivityStreams, Salmon, PubSubHubbub and Webfinger. Anything that supports those technologies is part of the network (e.g. GNU social instances) User discovery in the sense of UX is something I want to work on in the future, like implementing "who to follow" suggestions etc.