Posts to an individual mastodon server get shared across the network, people from other instances can "follow" your account (on your server) and their instance

Posts to an individual mastodon server get shared across the network, people from other instances can "follow" your account (on your server) and their instance will subscribe to your posts. They can "like" or re-post your post (with or without a comment) to get your account (on your server) more visibility and possibly more followers. In that regard I think these ideas are present, but now there is more than one server. This is only my opinion, but I think the gathering of followers and likes is something that the commercial product requires in order to keep people engaging with a product that they might otherwise put to the side.