The New Stack Makers

Back in April, Kris Nóva, now principal engineer at GitHub, started creating a server on Mastodon as a side project in her basement lab. Then in late October, Elon Musk bought Twitter for an eye-watering $44 billion, and began cutting thousands of jobs at the social media giant and making changes that alienated longtime users. And over the next few weeks, usage of Nóva’s hobby site, Hachyderm.io, exploded. “The server started very small,” she said on this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. “And I think like, one of my friends turned into two of my friends turned into 10 of my friends turned into 20 colleagues, and it just so happens, a lot of them were big names in the tech industry. And now all of a sudden, I have 30,000 people I have to babysit.” Though the rate at which new users are joining Hachyderm has slowed down in recent days, Nóva said, it stood at more than 38,000 users as of Dec. 20. Hachyderm.io is still run by a handful of volunteers, who also handle content moderation. Nóva is now seeking