To perhaps give context here and to others: 270 users on an instance is 100% fine. There are tons of instances with ~1 person. It's a federated system, it's

To perhaps give context here and to others: 270 users on an instance is 100% fine. There are tons of instances with ~1 person. It's a federated system, it's like them running their own email domain: it costs little and they can interact with everyone, and it provides a measure of provable identity beyond just "@mozilla on totally.real.mastodon.xyz". It does come with maintenance and moderation needs though, e.g. picking which users and instances you want(/need) to block. And some... quirks... that mean joining a mega-instance actually does behave better than a small instance. Kinda like email. So far I haven't seen any reasons given why they're shutting it down. Just "it's shutting down". "Only 270 users" is almost certainly not related to it though, closed-registration official hosts is completely normal. Kinda like email.