As I speak, mastodon.nz is up to 7.5k active accounts. That's bananas, crazy numbers, for a server that a few weeks ago had an order of magnitude fewer folks. I tender my heartfelt congratulations to the admins and moderators of the server; what a wild ride!
It does mean that mastodon.nz is now easily the single biggest host of the NZTwit community, and this confers hefty moderation responsibilities on a team that has expanded quickly to meet its needs. A volunteer team, mind you, motivated not by money or glory but by an interest in growing and supporting a community. Unpaid, and during their free time.
At the best of times, moderation isn't easy. Actually, mostly it sucks. Besides the day-to-day noise of defederating from openly fascistic servers, and dealing with the crappy flotsam that drifts in from the fediverse, there's the community itself. Everyone's always stepping on each others' toes, and often there's not a way to adjudicate i
