I don’t think they make money. It’s an open source project where people donate their time as far as I know.

EDIT: I forgot to mention you can donate to the project. Something has to pay for web hosting, I guess.

I built a new PC two months ago and it’s the first time I didn’t get Office. Libre Office has everything I need and it’s free.

I can spend 17 minutes driving to work, or 1.5 hours catching buses. Easy choice for me.

Also, who eats their pizza with a salad?

I’ll have to disagree there. When you Favourite a post, the person that posted it gets a notification about the fact, while if you Bookmark something no notification is sent. In effect you are telling the person that you “Liked” their post.

Also, looking at the Explore section of Mastodon the following message is shown at the top of the feed:

These are posts from across the social web that are gaining traction today. Newer posts with more boosts and favorites are ranked higher.

So those Favourites are used by the algorithm to rank posts. Bookmarks are totally private and only used to save posts for your own use.

I don’t see it that way. There are separate options to Favourite or Bookmark a post. To me Bookmarking something is so you can refer to it later, although nothing is stopping you using Favourites that way.

That’s a very specific sub-genre.