I dunno, getting control of the biggest instance that many people still treat as the default choice when joining instead of creating their own probably makes it a tiny bit easier to kickstart things. according to mastodon.social’s stats displayed on its main page, there are 192k active users which according to my math is more than 0 users on a new instance. almost two hundred thousand accounts you can datamine and eventually start displaying ads to - and probably at some point discconnect from the rest of the Fediverse and turn into its own thing, the way companies like to do when they embrace open standards. and all of this would be way easier if you owned the Mastodon trademark that most people are familiar with (and which for many people is basically the entire Fediverse, the same way how for people in some poor countries Facebook is basically the internet).
With the current growth figures a professionally run Mastodon instance with a semi competent PR campaign would easily have 200k users in a matter of a few weeks. Sure the trademarks and stuff would help a bit, but it’s not like like by investing they get full say to do whatever.
I dunno, getting control of the biggest instance that many people still treat as the default choice when joining instead of creating their own probably makes it a tiny bit easier to kickstart things. according to mastodon.social’s stats displayed on its main page, there are 192k active users which according to my math is more than 0 users on a new instance. almost two hundred thousand accounts you can datamine and eventually start displaying ads to - and probably at some point discconnect from the rest of the Fediverse and turn into its own thing, the way companies like to do when they embrace open standards. and all of this would be way easier if you owned the Mastodon trademark that most people are familiar with (and which for many people is basically the entire Fediverse, the same way how for people in some poor countries Facebook is basically the internet).
With the current growth figures a professionally run Mastodon instance with a semi competent PR campaign would easily have 200k users in a matter of a few weeks. Sure the trademarks and stuff would help a bit, but it’s not like like by investing they get full say to do whatever.