Gargron closed it off during its peak, not because of the load, but because mastodon.social became too synonymous with Mastodon proper, so he forced people to g

Gargron closed it off during its peak, not because of the load, but because mastodon.social became too synonymous with Mastodon proper, so he forced people to go to other instances so everyone wouldn't be in the same basket of eggs. A few months later, I think mastodon.social has been fairly open to signups, especially now that we've got all these French and Japanese instances up and running.