@nikolal
Yea it really is, but a little hard to wrap my head around.
Is it mostly using social media apps and not wanting to tracked?
I'll admit I am a huge newbie to all this.
Also, I guess because I'm not much of a social media person, I'm having trouble understanding and seeing the benefit in this platform.

@mhrbptl
Mastodon is free and open source (foss) social network platform, and can be selfhosted. Open source means that you can read its code (if you are technical enough) and understand what is done with your data and how it all works. There is no tracking or any other data mining of your content, which makes it privacy respectful social network. You can also host instance yourself, for full-proof privacy since you will own all content on your server.

@mhrbptl
Other commercial social networks don't have these properties, and they use everything you do in their platforms to tailor adds for you, and that is their business model, Mastodon is funded by donations. This particular instance is made to draw privacy minded people so they can interact with each other, to share thoughts, suggestions and learn something new, and I think thats very cool and thanks to @BurungHantu for this idea of joining people with this subject together.