I just now realized that #Mastodon is pretty much the modern day incarnation of the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s and 90s. Anyone remember #FidoNet ? It was the most popular BBS software in that time. Any admin could host FidoNet on their server and it connect it to other FidoNet servers. Hence someone could join a FidoNet "instance" of their choosing and be connected to numerous other instances. Mastodon is like a BBS over an http protocol... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet