Mastodon is a new kind of social media platform.  Luckily, it looks backward to be compatible with what you already know, Twitter, but it looks forward to something completely new, peer2peer media platforms.  Here is an example:  playing chess. Just click on the link, castling.club in the ‘toot’ below.

These tools are early days for me, but I feel that rising tide of usefulness begin to lift my hopes for so-called ‘federated’ systems.