social and community in a federated

As part of its mission, the company chose not to integrate with Mastodon or other decentralized social networks.

As Cselle had once put it, “It’s just very, very hard to do trust and safety on these [federated networks].”

He said that when you’re federated with other servers, you would have to block an entire instance (that is, another server) if it hosted content that didn’t fit with your own trust and safety guidelines. “It leads to a Balkanization of the network,” he had noted.

With Pebble.social, which has now added a few hundred users to Mastodon’s broader network, the goal is merely to experiment with social and community in a federated space.

There are no grand plans, but it’s unusual to see a social startup community live on, after the company itself shuts down.