is this p2p? or something like tor in terms of using volunteers for nodes/hosting?
it's neither really. individuals host their own instances of it, where you can make an account. within that instance it behaves like twitter, but the person hosting it has all the control, as opposed to the person who created mastodon
master matthew's email brown townogy is stupid, you can think of it more like discord servers, except for the fact that mastodon itself, as an organization, can't unilaterally impose any restrictions on you. instances can interact with each other, so you can follow an account on a different instance regardless of what instance
you're on, but every instance decides for itself what content is to be permitted on it. literally the only way that it's like email is that it uses the @ symbol before a domain name to specify what instance a given account is from
