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    Don't Tweet, Toot: Understanding Mastodon and the Federated Social Network
Links
General overviews of Mastodon

Join Mastodon (official, general-purpose)
Resources for Mastodon Newbies
(large list of links to resources)
Toot How-To: Intro to Mastodon
(friendly, lots of gifs)
What I wish I knew before joining Mastodon
(also friendly, also lots of gifs)
Mastodon tutorial (another friendly introduction)
Mastodon: like Twitter, but open and federated (technical details)
A new challenger to Twitter's walled garden: Mastodon
(from FSF, contextualizes Mastodon as just one of many OStatus-based
federated social networks)

Mastodon instances

The canonical (manually-curated) list of Mastodon instances.
Allows you to search for instances that match particular criteria (language, user count, moderation, etc.)
tooter.today uses a scoring procedure to suggest good instances to join
Radar: a map of the Fediverse (all OStatus-compatible instances on the web)

A few instances of interest:

mastodon.social: the flagship Mastodon site, where Mastodon developer
Eugen makes his home. (I'm on there too)
oulipo.social: a Mastodon instance that doesn't allow you to post toots containing
the letter 'e'
botsin.space: a Mastodon instance specifically for creative bots

Mobile apps for Mastodon

iOS: Amaroq (I use this and it's great!)
Android: Tusky

Mastodon API
Mastodon has an API, which looks sorta like the Twitter API. (This is in addition to Mastodon's support for OStatus.)

API documentation
List of libraries for working with the Mastodon API
I made a Mastodon bot in Python called Icebox Breakfast. Source code here

Similar networks
Other federated/distributed/peer-to-peer social networking systems:

Usenet
FidoNet
SMTP (i.e., e-mail)
RSS, hey remember Google Reader
Napster, hey remember MP3s
Scuttlebutt, a peer-to-peer social network (no servers!)

etc.
Relevant protocols

OStatus, which is a cobination of...
Atom Activity Streams for social media feeds (you can see the Atom data for my mastodon.social account here)
PubSubHubbub for real-time updates (good intro here)
Salmon for threaded comments

Running your own Mastodon instance
Mastodon is a Ruby on Rails application and you can run it on your own server!

Up and running with Docker
Installing on DigitalOcean
Even more instructions
If you want your own instance but don't want to install anything, try masto.host.