Back in April, Kris Nóva, now principal engineer at GitHub, started creating a server on Mastodon as a side project in her basement lab. Then in late October, Elon Musk bought Twitter for an eye-watering $44 billion, and began cutting thousands of jobs at the social media giant and making changes that alienated longtime users. And over the next few weeks, usage of Nóva’s hobby site, Hachyderm.io, exploded. “The server started very small,” she said on this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. “And I think l...