As long as you don't make your title incomprehensible to anyone who isn't a native English speaker

we allowed 196 to be here

These aren't mods talking, it's admins. They manage and pay for the server 196 is hosted on, that's a pretty big endeavor

That and "this is worthless, they only tested 10 000 people" are the worst

Anyone can host a server that'll talk to the others seamlessly (like Lemmy), but it doesn't talk to Lemmy

Key point: they get money for implementing features, not fixing bugs, so I think for now they're surviving off donations

Why Tildes and not just another instance? Tildes is still headed by a single person

None of this has anything to do with Mastodon's source code though, I don't know why you keep bringing up open source

astroturfed strawmanned groups such as extinction rebellion

What's wrong with XR?

"Signups: no" can also just mean that your sign-up will be checked manually, like on older instances like beehaw and sopuli

are getting butthurt

Were butthurt, until they got what they wanted and the community got banned

Man, when I joined this was a brand new instance with only few users. That wasn't even that long ago.

This. There's no need to join the biggest instance, as long as you're not among an instance's first users you won't notice much difference.