Mastodon is your personal soapbox where you can shout your thoughts.

However before you have followers, you're kinda shouting into the void.

However hashtags are like little campfires and if you go to one. You'll see people. If you share your thoughts around the campfire, people will see you.

Now once you've met people (and followed them), you can see them from atop your soapbox, no need to stand around the fire. Though in some cases, you won't know what they said before you became friends.

The more campfires you find (and follow) along with people, the busier your home feed is and the more interesting and/or fun your experience will be.

To get a good feed on Mastodon, you have to set it up yourself. The best way to do this, as others have mentioned, is to choose a few hashtags of interest and follow them. This will show posts from accounts talking about those things, at which point you should start following accounts liberally (you can always unfollow later). Those accounts, in turn, will "boost" posts from people they follow, which is how you get exposed to the conversations happening there.

It's this process for populating your feed with content that's interesting to you that many people find intimidating. The down side is that you don't automatically get fed content like on Twitter; the up side is that you have a lot more control over what content you see.

For single comments that you don't understand, the best course of action is to actually click into the comment and it will show what they are replying to. Kind of like Twitter, but backwards. Does that make sense?

It's

People have already tried to explain the idea behind Mastodon. If you are also looking for an overview of how Mastodon "works", please have a look at https://fedi.tips/.

https://www.southpark.de/videoclip/m31v1z/south-park-it-s-called-shitter

Here is a 20 minute infomercial that kind of covers it 😃