The distributed social network Mastodon burst into the popular consciousness last week, and is expanding at a rapid clip. There are over 216,000 users at the time of this writing, along with 684 instances being tracked — up from 649 just earlier in the day.*
This is what a growing community looks like.*
For the uninitiated: An instance is a server running Mastodon, and can be themed or **t. Members of one instance can talk with members on other participating instances — the entire group of which is called the fediverse — if everyone decides to play nice. A user can, however, choose to keep what is tooted (aka posted) only within their instance. This neat privacy feature allows for narrowly focused instances to form.* Read more...