\n<\/p>\n
Pebble<\/a>, a startup that took on Twitter and failed<\/a>, has returned from the dead \u2014 as a Mastodon instance, it seems. The company announced<\/a> last month that it was shutting down its Twitter\/X alternative citing the increasingly competitive landscape, X\u2019s ability to retain users, and its own failure to gain traction with a wider audience. But after deliberately avoiding any plans to participate in the decentralized social network Mastodon during its time as a startup, Pebble has now given itself a fresh start as a dedicated Mastodon server dubbed pebble.social<\/a>.<\/p>\n It was initially unclear if the new Pebble server was a community-led attempt to keep the small network afloat or something more official. Despite clearly displaying Pebble\u2019s branding and tagline, there wasn\u2019t any information about who started the Pebble instance or why.<\/p>\n But TechCrunch has now confirmed the Pebble instance was recently established by Pebble co-founder and CEO Gabor Cselle as something of a new social experiment. However, members of the Pebble community are involved in the server\u2019s moderation.<\/p>\n Cselle tells us that the community asked the founders to set up a subreddit and a Mastodon instance so they\u2019d have somewhere to go when Pebble shut down, so they did.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then something really interesting happened, which is after we started with Mastodon, a bunch of people came over,\u201d he says. One of them, a user only known as \u201cBlobcat\u201d (@blobcat@pebble.social<\/a>) posted a link to their GitHub repo where they had styled the Mastodon instance to look just like how Pebble used to. So Pebble.social got a new look and has since grown to a few hundred active users, as well.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really a testament to the power of open source,\u201d says Cselle.<\/p>\n After restyling the server and learning how to use blocklists to keep out unwanted content and trolls from the wider Mastodon network, Cselle put a few people in charge of managing moderation of the instance as he dealt with winding down the Delaware C-Corp that was the old pebble.is.<\/a><\/p>\n At its height, Pebble reached just 20,000 registered users but its usage had fallen to just around 1,000 daily users following its rebranding from T2<\/a>, a placeholder name that was meant to signify its position as a Twitter clone. The startup had prioritized copying Twitter\u2019s user interface and features, right down to DMs<\/a> and a checkmark-based verification system<\/a>, but aimed to differentiate itself by focusing on trust and safety as a key selling factor. As it turns out, that message didn\u2019t resonate with would-be T2 users \u2014 or at least, it wasn\u2019t enough of a draw to get them excited about abandoning one app for another.<\/p>\n As part of its mission, the company chose not to integrate with Mastodon or other decentralized social networks. As Cseelle had once put it, \u201cIt\u2019s just very, very hard to do trust and safety on these [federated networks].\u201d He said that when you\u2019re federated with other servers, you would have to block an entire instance (that is, another server) if it hosted content that didn\u2019t fit with your own trust and safety guidelines. \u201cIt leads to a Balkanization of the network,\u201d he had noted.<\/p>\n