Hometown: A light weight fork of Mastodon

"By "light weight" I don't mean more efficient; I mean this fork is 99.999% identical to Mastodon with a few key tweaks. This project is based on the principle of: minimum code change for maximum user experience change. This makes it easy for the basically-one-person who runs the project to keep it up to date. By our best understanding, our major changes are not wanted by the Mastodon project, hence maintaining this fork instead of trying to commit the changes to Mastodon."

I've been looking at setting up a Mastodon instance (not due to Elon) and may try this out this weekend.

Obviously Mastadon's getting uptake due to this Twitter drama, but how much traffic is actually moving there?

Is it just think tankers, media personalities etc. preparing stuff there in case of something or is the overall readership actually getting onboard also?

I've seen a 2 magnitude increase in downloads on the app store, but I'm not sure how to find overall usage numbers.