It's more like the old BBS networks of old, like FidoNET, etc. And it has a similar vibe to that.
I like it for this reason. If you go in expecting Twitter, you will be disappointed. That's not what it is.
With Mastodon it gets incrementally harder to just add someone. Are they on the same Mastodon instance as me? Does my Mastodon instance federate the Mastodon instance they're on? Is this handled client side with multiple identities? Now how do I handle these multiple identities, so I broadcast "toots" (cringe) to all of them?
Also almost nobody I've come across actually says "toots" -- they just say "posts" :-)
The equivalent of the FidoNET nodelist would basically be whatever the most popular Mastodon servers are choosing to federate with. It seems in practice to be more of a consensus driven thing, but has the same net effect. We'll see if it scales.
This way I can follow anything on the fediverse, not only Mastodon accounts but PeerTube, Friendica, PixelFed, FunkWhale, etc. all from my Mastodon account.