Mastodon in Korea

Real quick here, I was just surfing around a bit checking out Mastodon (open source decentralized Twitter alternative) . I wondered what the Korean adoption of it was like.

Korean users on Mastodon. Image Source.

Is it popular in Korea? No, no it's not. But its popularity has slowly risen over the past year.

Mastodon use in Korea. Source.

Numbers in Korea seems to fluctuate between 700~900 users. Compare that to nearly 1 million in neighboring Japan.

Most populated Korea instance of Mastodon. Source.

The most "popular" Mastodon instance (≈local server, sort of) is called Twingyeo (트잉여), at https://twingyeo.kr, even though a domain lookup says it's hosted in Japan. It holds 492 users (as of this post), so about half of all South Korean users.
The second most popular is Sakaba at https://sakaba.space which appears to be running in Japanese yet a lookup indicates it's from Busan, South Korea. Both appear to have userbases heavily from the otaku demographic. Some have been to the Google offices. Neat.
Coming in 3rd was https://chorus.space with 48 users.

About page for Twingyeo.kr Source.

I'm not surprised by the type of users, since Mastodon is still a fringe techie thing. There are a few Korean articles, but not much. Here's a Korean-language sign-up guide but you can follow along with the screenshots:

마스토돈을 사용해봅시다. (트위터와 비슷한 SNS)

Finally, this article suggests why Japan has so many users:

Mastodon is big in Japan. The reason why is… uncomfortable.

Hint: lolicon.

Will I use Mastodon? No. Should you? Probably not. Neat idea, but I just don't realistically see it ever gaining traction in the real world.