Step #1, Find your Mastodon Server

This sounds weird, if you're used to Twitter. Isn't there just one server? No, people who use Mastodon use any one of LOTS of servers. It's kind of like email -- you might use GMail (@gmail.com), or AOL Mail (@aol.com), or your work email (@9to5.com) as your mail "server". But you can read and send emails to people who are on other servers. The server you're on mostly doesn't matter.

So you need to find yourself a server. Go to https://joinmastodon.org/servers to find a server that fits you -- you can find servers by your area of interest, your geographic area, or really just anything. Some servers will require that you "apply" to join them, while others just let you sign up. It's not a big deal at this point...because you can move from one server to another later.

Once you pick a server, before signing up, you might want to do two things:

1) Check the server's about page. To do that, take the server name, and add https:// before it, and /about after it. So if the server name is candypants.socialbanana, you'll want to visit https://candypants.socialbanana/about in your web browser. That'll tell you a bit more about the server. Look good? OK!

2) Check to see if it's a server that's been marked as "problematic". This can be a hot-button issue, but for now, visit https://mastodon.social/about (one of the largest Mastodon servers), scroll down to "Moderated Servers", click on the twiddle to open up the list, and make sure the server you're interested in is not listed there.

Now you're good to go! Sign up. Poke around your server if you want, and see what you see. Don't worry about "federation" or "local" or any of that for now -- it might become interesting later, but for now, if you're trying to re-create your Twitter experience, let's go to the next step.