DM54I have no idea how this site works. Complete muppet. But always keen to hear people talk with kindness and expertise on #Auspol #linux #basketball and anything else. Feel free to explain Masterdon to me like I'm 5, because I set up an account when Twitter died and then have mostly bluesky'd.
hawthornbunny@davidmaddock Welcome to the Fediverse!
Your post appeared in my feed because you tagged it #linux, which is one of the tags I follow. I'm on a completely different Mastodon instance to you, run voluntarily by a completely different person, but because Mastodon instances all talk to each other, I was still able to see your message. It's like a whole bunch of different Twitters, all interconnected!
This approach of loosely connecting different instances together is called "federation". It has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is decentralization (no one company owning your entire social apparatus). A key disadvantage is that if your instance closes down for whatever reason, you lose your account and all your posts - however, you can mitigate this by backing up and transferring your account, if you get enough warning.
Mastodon is intentionally built without algorithms - you decide exactly what you want to see. This requires more effort, but gives you more freedom.