@Economic_Hitman @graf @j @p

> In the beginning, who were your first users, and how did you onboard them?

A couple IRL friends. I made it for myself but made it open reg. I created a Twitter user and invited people to join and got some users from there, I mostly did not know the people from Twitter IRL. There was another server on fedi called gnutan.xyz and it died and some of my earliest and most cherished users came from there.

I could tell stories about some of the early users. We still have a couple around.

> How did your instances grow in popularity so much?

I think we managed to attract a diverse group of users early on and ppl talked about a variety of topics and created a community based on that rather than the free speech server trap of only saying the n word or complaining about being banned from everywhere else.

> Did you advertise? Or was it just a close group of friends and grew by word-of-mouth?

Durign some Twitter exodus I would jump in threads and say hey you can come here. I went to some conventions/conferences and handed out physical advertisements, but got basically no users from that. Someone on my site advertised us on 4chan /g/ and we got some users from that. But, mostly word of mouth at this point.