social.growyourown.services is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Single-user Mastodon instance for the Grow Your Own Services site

Server stats:

5
active users

Grow Your Own Services 🌱

When follower numbers go up on a centralised corporate social network like Facebook etc, those aren't your followers. They belong to the corporation, and the corporation will take followers away from you so they can charge you money simply to reach them. Meta does this directly, others do it in more convoluted ways, but the idea is the same.

You can avoid such extortion by being on a federated social network like the Fediverse, preferably on your own server. Fediverse follows are truly yours.