The Verge – You can follow whoever you want, no matter which Mastodon ‘instance’ they hang out in. “The torrent of former tweeters streaming toward alternative social networks seems to be ongoing, and the social network that is probably gaining the most attention is Mastodon. This open-source network of independent servers (called “instances”) had jumped to 2.5 million users between October and November — and is continuing its ascent.Admittedly, there has been a bit of confusion among the new members of the Masto-set as to how it resembles Twitter and how it differs. To go through all the various permutations of how to really use Mastodon to its full capabilities would take more than a single article, and as a matter of fact, there are a variety of resources available (a few of which I’ll list at the end of this article). So, since the beginning of any social network is finding other accounts to follow — and to hope they want to follow you back — here I’m going to simply explain how you follow (or unfollow) somebody and how to manage your own follows. But before I go into the step-by-step, here are just a few of the things that I’ve discovered in the three-odd weeks that I’ve been trying Mastodon out. I hope they help anyone trying to figure out how to deal with this new non-Twitter.”