Great episode on Mastodon and the various instances.

BTW, I heard that you noticed the interface looked like Tweetdeck.  You can change that if you go into Preferences--&gt;Appearance and uncheck the box for the "Enable advanced web interface".  This will make the interface much simpler with only the column of the timeline you've chosen (Home, Notifications, Local timeline, or Federated timeline) on the list at the right of the page.  The instance I'm on (mastodon.xyz) is running version 2.9.3 of Mastodon, so anything at that version or greater should have this option.