then something really interesting

The company announced last month that it was shutting down its Twitter/X alternative citing the increasingly competitive landscape, X’s 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.

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’s branding and tagline, there wasn’t any information about who started the Pebble instance or why.

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.