Mastodon is the "email" of social networking. Or the "WordPress" of social networking if you are into web sites.
It allows anyone to communicate with anyone, similar to email, without a central provider in the middle. It is very
similar to Twitter, but decentralized and open source.
For example, I just set up noc.social, which anyone can join and participate. And you can follow and interact with
people from other instances (like mastodon.social, for example).
You will have more characters to communicate (up to 500), and won't have to worry about Google or Twitter ever banning your account -
for no reason.
Try it out: https://noc.social.
You can follow me on Mastodon here: https://noc.social/@dcid