Thank you for the explanation!:-)
But can someone follow you from a different Mastodon instance than the one you are currently on? Or was that something that changed in the last year? Maybe I misunderstood or it wasn't explained to me well, but I definitely get that people don't want to switch instances bc they will lose all their old followers, but is that the main impediment to people using Mastodon - they just don't want to switch to using it? If so, it's enough, bc as we have seen, these large entities like Twitter are a lot more fragile than people used to believe.