So, I'm slightly (more than slightly?) confused.

If I'm here and I'm on mastodon.social, who sees what? Can I merge the streams?

@telemachus no! They're separate identities. You exist within the context of an instance. Your followers don't transfer etc.

So, pick a server and make it 'home', your canonical self. From that context, you can still follow people on any other server by appending their server. @[email protected] and @[email protected] are different.

If you are on a.com, you can just refer to @username to get @[email protected].

Make sense?

@mykola That does make some sense, a lot in fact. But I'm not yet seeing how to "follow people...by appending their server". So far, the only way I see to follow is to search and then click the follow icon. But I can't search for people on other instances, right?
@telemachus you can, if you know their instance name. This is complicated by the fact that the UI collapses "@mykola @mastodon.social" into just "@mykola" - but remove the space and that's how you reference someone on another instance.