Mastodon uses environment variables as its configuration.
For convenience, it can read them from a flat file called `.env.production` in the Mastodon directory, but they can always be overridden by a specific process. For example, systemd service files can read environment variables from an `EnvironmentFile` or from inline definitions with `Environment`, so you can have different configuration parameters for specific services. They can also be specified when calling Mastodon from the command line.