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’s moderation.

Cselle tells us that the community asked the founders to set up a subreddit and a Mastodon instance so they’d have somewhere to go when Pebble shut down, so they did.

“And then something really interesting happened, which is after we started with Mastodon, a bunch of people came over,” he says. One of them, a user only known as “Blobcat” (@blobcat@pebble.social) 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.

“It’s really a testament to the power of open source,” says Cselle.