Hell, even earlier: > On Mastodon you can only see or be seen by your close circles. Mastodon is like a library full of small study rooms. You can raise your v

Hell, even earlier: > On Mastodon you can only see or be seen by your close circles. Mastodon is like a library full of small study rooms. You can raise your voice to reach everyone in your small room, but you cannot talk to the whole library at once. People can only get into your room if the room moderators let them in; if they're not in your room, they'll never find out what you're talking about. I legit have no idea what this metaphor is trying to convey. I have regularly posted or commented on other people's posts, only to have those favourited or boosted by people on other instances, often ones I've never heard of. How does that happen? Well, first, I have followers on other instances, which means my posts end up on their Federated timeline, and anything I mark with a hashtag will show up in searches on those instances. Second, if folks I don't know spot something I write that they like, either through a hashtag search, the Federated timeline, or by participating in a thread, they may boost my post which makes it visible to their followers, and thus content propagates through the network. The result is that ultimately that post gets to a large part of the fediverse, it just happens a bit differently. In fact, I've had higher engagement within the fediverse across instances than I ever did across all of Twitter because there is no algorithm I have to game to get attention.