@antonyh Since it's a decentralized platform, there's a few quirks to know about how it works:
- Every instance (of which you had to join one, like infosec.exchange) has different codes of conduct, privacy policies, content moderation policies, etc. and as a result fosters a slightly different "culture" or "feel" to it.
- Think of your instance admins like you would the high-in-the-sky corporate overlords on other social medias: they're the ones who enforce ^ (don't assume your DMs are truly private, immature leadership is a HUGE red flag, etc.)
- The scope you can see on general feeds is basically the federation of users (or instances, forget which) which others on your instance follow, excluding the ones that get blocked by your admin for endemic spam etc. That being said -- here be dragons, the Federated feeds can be kind of a dumpster fire.
- I think Mastodon (the social media network) has some limited inreroperability with other Fediverse (the distributed platform) apps, but I'm really not sure. In terms of **Mastodon** clients though, only onr I've found worthwhile are mobile ones.
- Follow @FediTips for occasional tips

General Stuff:
- Trawling your Twitter/X/LinkedIn/etc. follow lists to find people here, then maybe looking through their Followers list is a good way to get a sense of who all is on here.
- Like everyone said: (#)introduction tagged post, short bio, profile pic (hypocritical ik lol) are all good to make yourself not look like a bot, and alt-tagging photos with captions is more of an expectation here than most platforms for accessibility and low bandwidth users