First thing you should know that #mastodon is a decentralized social media platform.

That is the fundamental difference between of it from #twitter or #facebook.

A decentralized network, which means there is no central group with all of the power.

So here it is #fediverse

#mastodon isn’t just a website, it is a federation.

There are thousands, of small communities that live within the Mastodon system.

Each one is independent and unique, but they can all talk to one another.

These communities are called "INSTANCES".

So you are not creating your account in a centralised server here like in https://twitter.com.

Instead at any domain that runs Mastodon is called an instance and you can join any instance!

Confused?

Think about various email providers.

Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook etc.

These email providers are analogous to #mastodon instances.

U can create an email address is [email protected] or [email protected].

Here xyz is the username. We know that both email address belong to different persons or same persons.

They can send email to each other.

Here in #fediverse our #mastodon works in the same way, for that it uses a protocol called Activity Hub, so that various instances can speak to each other.

So http://mastodon.social and http://mstdn.social and http://masthead.social are different instances in #mastodon

I seen that someone here complain about fake site and claimed that finally created profile in the original site, means http://mastodon.social

Natural confusion.

Unlike Twitter which is having a unique site https://twitter.com,

You can join #mastodon through any INSTANCE

http://mastodon.social is the flagship site, which is maintained by Eugen, who is the creator of #mastodon which is having around 4 lakh users!

http://pawoo.net instance with 5.8 lakh users is biggest

But my instance http://mstdn.social is having only 3721 users!