Pebble, a startup that took on Twitter and failed, has returned from the dead -- as a Mastodon instance, it seems. The company announced last month that
Same. Have a gently used Pebble Time laying next to my Amazfit Band 7.
You're gonna want a firewall on your phone if you use the latter. The Zepp app tries to send so much crap to random servers online. Using the Rethink firewall right now. It certainly catches A LOT of stuff.
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.