@adamghill If you didn’t know or don’t remember, but Mastodon.social was closed for signup for several days during the first “Mastodon rush”. I don’t ever remember Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo ever closing signing ups.
Also you ignored again the fact that this instance has a looooong list of “moderated servers” which you can’t communicate with. For example, the freeatlantis one has an interesting account there which makes graphs about the number of accounts signing up to #Mastodon instances, with growth over time that, if you’re member of mastodon.social you couldn’t follow.