Thank you all for the replies. So as an artist this would be a positive as my posts could get sent out to a number of servers for people who have no idea who I am to see my work?

It feels like a giant chatroom right now with the public timeline. Not that that is a bad thing. Just wondering how I can use it to chat with friends and post art for followers or if it's meant to be exclusively for chatting with friends.

@Charmer we haven't figured out what we will do with public timeline eventually. i made an issue proposing how it might work in the future https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/issues/236

if you want to use it like twitter and stay in a friend network there will be features coming to help with that too