lae made a translation of one of pixiv's engineering blogs that can be found here. It's really interesting from a technical standpoint -- especially given that Pawoo has scaled so quickly since it first started out, way faster than mastodon.social at least. Can't wait to see more improvements to the service, especially with Pixiv's engineers contributing.

Moreover, it's kind of interesting to watch this development as although I don't doubt Mastodon would have continued growing, Pixiv's creation of pawoo has really popularized the service, at least within Japan. Users at mstdn.jp doubled in a matter of days. And amusingly, the reason why pawoo got so popular was because of loli and shota content being allowed outside of Twitter's control (as Twitter operates under US legal jurisdiction, not Japan's). Outside of that though, Mastodon has a ton of things going for it compared to Twitter. Privacy, no ads, and desperately needed content moderation that Twitter lacks among other things.

And I can't really help but keep thinking lolis were actually the reason behind all this. That lolis actually led to a ridiculously large adoption rate at first by the artist community, but now to a large plethora of general users.

Mikaeri said:

And I can't really help but keep thinking lolis were actually the reason behind all this. That lolis actually led to a ridiculously large adoption rate at first by the artist community, but now to a large plethora of general users.

It's not that specifically. It's just that Japanese people tend to take their hobbies more seriously and put way more time into them than many other cultures tend to do. Thus, they tend just don't have the time or interest for stuff like dating or having kids.