Mastodon got a shout-out in The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/what-it-takes-to-put-your-phone-away
"Odell believes that there is another way. She cites, for example, the indie platform Mastodon, which is crowdfunded and decentralized. (It is made up of independently operated nodes, called 'instances,' on which users can post short messages, or 'toots.')"