Ah yes. You're right, certainly would be stopped by Twitter even if technically possible.
303 karma · joined July 14, 2019
Your question sounds like someone asking how a user of a newly opened Facebook account can follow people on Twitter. They're entirely different services. The federating, or not, is immaterial.
The first part is the alternative service.
Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, presented in a Twitter-like format and flow. People who use it do so because they want to avoid the restrictions and cultures of Twitter. They don't want to post the same content across the two services. They don't want to interact with Twitter. They want to be on Mastodon.
The second part is the federating of the service.
Instances of Mastodon are spread around, hosting a set of users on their individual servers. Each of those instances can then communicate between with the others, intending for you to be able to follow and interact with users on other Mastodon server instances as transparently as those of your local Mastodon server. They are still interacting within the Mastodon environment.
The tone from the beginning (at least in Chapter 0) struck me as what I might class "fey wankery". The wry style gets into the way of communication. Is there some misapprehension amongst STEM explainers that people who are less familiar with maths need to be treated like skittish, possibly mentally-challenged deer?
Or is it a nod to Socratic dialogue except one of two is a moron?
Then Chapter One leaps into rational numbers, set theory and fractions and commits the usual errors: asymptotic curve into complexity, no history, no vivid metaphorical visualisations and (a personal peeve) no historical or causal explanations.
Chapter One literally starts with a question ("What are numbers?") and does not ever answer it. You can count them, some of them are natural (what does that mean?), you can perform operations on them. But what are they, Professor Kleitman? An abstract concept that can be derived from our ability to discern a first order similarity between both similar and dissimilar objects? Is it too vast a question for a introduction to calculus? Then don't use the question in your section header.
Operations? "There are addition, subtraction, multiplication and division." Why? Why isn't there redition? What's redition? I don't know, it's an operation I made up, but you seem to have plucked four relations between natural numbers from the air and asked me to assume that's acceptable.
The text continues in similar, tedious terms, walking us through the basics on stepping stones of assumption and unearned trust.
Educating beginners and "artists" doesn't require you to speak to us like five year olds. Take a leaf from Feynman or Fuller's books and talk to us like adults but do the work in creating vibrant metaphor.
Just my opinion and apologies to Professor Kleitman.
To end on a positive note, the opening pages of Gilbert Strang's book, linked by another poster here, were much more effective in conceptualising the need for and use of calculus by anchoring it in a strong metaphorical example.
In barely a page or two, I understand a relationship between velocity and distance - and that time is involved - and how that relationship can be geometrically envisioned.
Further, I'm already pondering how one might deal with a more realistic car journey with a variable velocity, something that calculus will address later on.
The difference? No infantilisation; instead a clear and applicable metaphorical example.