

I’m probably a bit late to reply, but… He was @ mentioned in the body of the original post, which Mastodon would have notified him of because mas.to is federating. Opening the notification would bring him to this thread on Mastodon, where everything would appear as it normally does when viewing a thread on Mastodon. From there, you can hold a conversation as normal with notifications and all. Unless you were looking at instance URLs, you probably wouldn’t even notice the user you’re replying to isn’t on Mastodon themselves.
Beauty of federation! It (mostly) just works!
It’s not a good ratio, but assuming they managed to fill the three developer positions they were intending to when this interview was given last year and no one has left since then, that’s 5 full time employees to 5 board members. I can’t find more up-to-date numbers on the employee count unfortunately.