fosstodon.org is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Fosstodon is an invite only Mastodon instance that is open to those who are interested in technology; particularly free & open source software.
If you wish to join, contact us for an invite.
This is actually an interesting question. I think technically they're kinda the same, but we gave them different names just to make communication easier for us.