People make Mastodon sound more complicated than it is, because they're excited about the ways it avoids Twitter's horrible, fundamental flaws. Having to pick a home server is different than signing up for Twitter, yes, but it's more-or-less the same as picking an email service, once you've got one, it doesn't really matter in terms of connecting with other people. And Mastodon makes it a lot easier to switch from one to another if you want to than it would be to switch from a Gmail to an iCloud address or something, you can just update one place and everything goes to the new account.
This article goes over the basics.
And Twitter was pretty complicated in its early days, too (it was designed for you to post to it using text messages!), and still has a lot of weird little rules and practices people stopped thinking about because they've learned them already.
I'm hopeful Mastodon finally getting some inertia, I signed up back in 2018 when Twitter did... something objectionable. Oh, right, it was when they refused to ban or moderate Alex Jones. Anyway, I like it conceptually by spreading things out a bit more into the good old days of the internet where places could be separate rather than everyone in the world all living under Twitter's or Facebook's or Reddit's roof. And even though it's decentralized, it still has a way to verify your identity, which Twitter no longer has, since Musk turned their anti-fake-account feature into a paid-dues membership badge that anyone could get, no matter who they say they are.
EDIT: Anyway, to return to the primary topic, while I was filling out my follows earlier (it's a fun scavenger hunt of "Someone I follow on Twitter says they're on Mastodon, I follow them, then I check who they're following for familiar names and follow them, rinse, repeat"), I stumbled on to a few Trek novelists.
William Leisner
Una McCormack
James Swallow
