@blenderdumbass Mastodon is only one (incompatible) implementation of the ActivityPub protocol.

There are several other implementations, including Pleoroma and GNU social, which do federate when mastodon hasn't decided to suddenly drop protocol support (mastodon previously dropped OStatus support without giving GNU social a few more months to implement ActivityPub), when the support for the incompatible changes made to the mastodon network have been added into Pleoroma and when every single non-mastodon instance hasn't been added to the fediblock list.