To have your own, yes, more or less (it handles downtime to some extent). Running your own server is not the "for dummies" version.

The for dummies version is "just go sign up on a instance with open sign ups and reasonable moderation", I'd recommend hachyderm.io to the tech crowd. It doesn't matter that much what server your on.

ok! Thank you! I will of course spend the time to learn more as well but that was very helpful.

Basically Mastodon is a bunch of different social networks, but you can follow/subscribe people who are using any of them. If you want your own server, you need to leave it on somewhere for it to pull messages from other people and push yours out. Otherwise, you can just pick a server and set up an account on it.

Which server you join doesn't particularly matter, but most of them offer some sort of "see all of the messages on this server" functionality, so if you pick one with a lot of people who have common interests, you'll have a better default experience.