In early April, open-source social platform Mastodon had its 15 minutes of fame. The service has been compared ad nauseam to Twitter, from which it borrows its basic structure: short messages from users, retweets (or retoots, in its parlance), chronological timelines updating in real-time, and so on. Mastodon’s layout even cops a basic version of Tweetdeck, the popular third-party Twitter software.

Creator Eugen Rochko made Mastodon as a way of improving on Twitter’s formula; the open-source platform gave users more privacy options, and improved the overall experience with expanded character counts and chronological timelines. The service launched months ago, but it didn’t really take off until Twitter rolled out an update on how it d…

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