@bradleypace I can try to help explain.

Basically, the Fediverse is like if social media was like email.

You can be on any email service like Gmail and still communicate with those on Outlook.

In this case though, mastodon can be hosted by many different people and there's other interfaces as well like Pixelfed which is like Instagram.

The Fediverse let's you interact with most of them all through your Mastodon account. You just need to know their Fediverse username.

As you might be able to see, you're on mastodon.social while I am on my own personal site social.beaware.live and we can communicate.

It's quite exciting.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I'm very passionate about this place and want to help as many people as I can get the most out of Fediverse as they can. There's a lot of quirks and it can be very jarring for new people.