I'm finding Mastodon a lot easier to understand having I've realized that it's just blogs. Everyone gets a little blog, on their own server or someone else's. Following someone is pretty much subscribing to their feed. You can even roll your own implementation from scratch.

Under the hood ActivityPub is more-or-less RSS/Atom Plus: it adds the ability to send replies to posts, and send and receive likes, and "boost" (aka retweet) posts - and a push-based notification system so you can see stuff faster than if everyone was polling each other

But really Mastodon is a return to personal blogging, loosely disguised as an open source Twitter clone I think this is great!

@aaronpk collected some resources for getting mastodon-flavoured AP support running, either with an existing blog (e.g. bridgy fed) or with light-weight software (e.g. microblog.pub) aaronparecki.com/aaronpk