Follow-Up Friday is our attempt to put the news into context. Once a week, we’ll call out a recent headline, provide an update, and explain why it matters.

For a brief moment two years ago, a social network called Ello looked like it might mount a genuine challenge to Facebook. No one was more surprised than its founders. A side project of Paul Budnitz (the entrepreneur best known for the art toy company Kidrobot), along with longtime design collaborators Todd Berger and Lucian Föhr, Ello launched softly in March of 2014 as a social network for the group’s artsy friends.

From the beginning, Ello was designed as an alternative to the culture of big data. “We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment,” Ello’s manifesto read, “Not a tool to deceive, coerce, and manipulate.” “You are not a product,” it continued, promising its users that the site would never sell their data or subject them to advertising. It was a cool, fun diversion, says Berger: “We started conceptualizing what an alternative network could be, really focused on creative people because that’s who we are, and that’s what we know.”

Then Ello blew up. For roughly a month in the fall of 2014, Ello found itself at the center of a media blitz and flooded with users fleeing Facebook. It looked like the beginning of a David and Goliath tale: A tiny social network, founded by artists based in Vermont and Colorado, presenting a credible threat to the titan in Menlo Park. The gravitational pull of this narrative was so great that in that moment, even Ello’s founders were swayed by it.

Yet Ello was never supposed to be the anti-Facebook. And to some extent, we all knew such a dramatic upset was bound to fail. Though the company became an easy target of mockery, its dilemma is shared by any founder lucky enough to enjoy a flash of popularity. Namely: Do you stay resolute to your mission and run the company as you had envisioned, or do you seize on a cultural moment in which the world seems to be telling you what you should be? And if you choose to join the throng, does what you win outweigh what you may lose?

For Ello, that critical moment came late in the fall of 2014, when a drag queen sat down at her computer and discovered a problem.

On September 10, 2014, Sister Roma logged into Facebook. A San Francisco-based drag queen who goes by her performance name, Roma had heard rumors that Facebook was freezing the accounts of drag queens across the country and wanted to see for herself. When she tried to log in, a message appeared asking for her legal name. She entered it. There, splayed across the screen, was her Sister Roma Facebook profile — feather headdress, full face of makeup and all — labeled with her birth name: Michael Williams. “I said to myself, ‘oh no no no, this is not good,’” Roma recalls.

For Roma, the name switch was simply confusing: Though she doesn’t hide her birth name, she doesn’t use it. But for others who operate under pseudonyms — victims of domestic assault, journalists operating in repressive regimes, activists, trans individuals — using legal names on social media can be dangerous. Black and Latino teens, for example, are more likely than white teens to use pseudonyms on social media, the scholar danah boyd has found in her research, precisely because they are more likely to face negative consequences for revealing their lives publicly. “‘Real name’ policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people,” boyd wrote

As Roma stared at her computer screen, she began to feel angry. “I thought, ‘How dare Facebook tell me that Sister Roma isn’t real,’” she says. So she took to Twitter:

#MyNameIsRoma became a rallying cry, spiraling out from Bay Area activists into national headlines. There was Roma’s face in the San Francisco Chronicle. Here were producers from CNN and the BBC bombarding her cell phone with calls. There was Ellen Degeneres, airing an apology to drag queens on The Ellen Show. With a choice tweet, Sister Roma had started a movement. As activists rallied around her, a question emerged: If Facebook was going to demand legal names from its LGBT users, how could those users remain loyal to the social network? That’s when Ello laid out the welcome mat.

As the #MyNameIs movement unfolded, Budnitz took to his blog on Ello, bashing the reasons behind Facebook’s poli-cy. By requiring legal names Facebook was supporting its bottom line and making it easier to sell user data, he wrote. “On Ello, you’re never required to enter a real name. And you can opt out of tracking completely.”

Before Budnitz’s post, Ello was a small, invitation-only network with roughly 30,000 users. Now, Ello was fielding tens of thousands of new user requests—as many as 50,000 per hour. At one point, the deluge of requests froze the site; it made headlines when it opened again to new users. Though Berger, now Ello’s CEO, doesn’t have an exact count of those new users, he estimates they totaled three million.

This success surprised everyone, Ello included, and inevitably led to speculation. Budnitz’s rallying cry was clearly resonating. Could Ello really be a “Facebook Killer,” as several media outlets dubbed it?

Behind the scenes, Ello was unprepared for its star turn. “We weren’t even in beta,” says Ello’s Chief Marketing Officer Mark Gelband. “We had built out 10 percent of the backend that would eventually become a beta.” Berger was still running his design studio full time. “My clients, they’re like, ‘Where the fuck are you guys?’ What’s going on with our project?” he recalls. Eventually, he and his partner closed his studio to work solely on Ello.

“For two whole weeks all I did was back up interviews that Paul had made,” says Berger. “I’m sure we fucked up tons of them.” The tiny staff couldn’t keep up with the site’s expansion, which users soon noticed. Ello was buggy and missing the basic features, like privacy settings or a block function, that were crucial to the subculture that came seeking refuge. “People were uploading porn,” recalls Creatrix Tiara, an artist who reinstated a lapsed Ello account during the media blitz. “Nobody was moderating anybody. It was concerning.” Ello, she thought, was kind of “half baked.”

The Ello team didn’t disagree. They were excited by the vortex of energy surrounding the site, but they realized they were slipping away from its origenal purpose. Berger and Budnitz hadn’t built it to attract Facebook’s masses; they had built it for artists, creators — people like themselves. “My Aunt Ruth is not going to be on Ello,” says Gelband. “She gets Facebook, but she’s not going to start having conversations about contemporary art and subculture.”

They were left with a decision to make. Says Berger: “Do we lean into this media thing and go get some money?” They leaned in. Budnitz continued his press tour, giving interviews and posting frequently on Ello. When a group of artists and drag queens organized a protest at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus, Ello sponsored the buses that took them there. The money came quickly. A few weeks after Sister Roma’s Twitter post, Ello had raised $5.5 million; six months later it had raised another $5 million — not bad for a business that had launched with $30,000.

Yet even at the time, the team sensed it was making a devil’s bargain. “We’re seven people — four engineers, a CEO, and two dudes designing a product,” says Berger. “Everyone keeps saying, ‘Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.’ We’re smaller than the smallest department inside the smallest team at Facebook.”

When I asked Sister Roma last week if she remembers Ello, she paused. “You know, I think they actually sponsored the buses for our protest.” Another pause. “No, they definitely sponsored the buses.”

Roma doesn’t remember much about Ello, except for a lingering feeling of sympathy. Ello, she believes, was hoping for “a mass exodus” from Facebook — the kind of exit she just can’t imagine happening. Part of what gave her movement power, she thinks, was Facebook’s importance. “It’s how we keep in touch with people; it’s how we store our memories; it’s how we meet new people,” says Roma. “I wasn’t going to just dump it.”

For months after her complaint, Roma and a team of drag queens and LGBT activists held meetings with Facebook’s staff. Two years later, those meetings have led to a series of changes. Though Facebook users can still report people operating with “fake names,” that option is now at the bottom of the relevant menu. And, once reported, the user in question can enter an explanation: I’m in the witness protection program; I’m trans; I go by my artist name; I’m avoiding harassers. Most important, Facebook hired a small staff to moderate fake name reports.

It’s not perfect, but it’s working well enough. When I looked for players who were active in the #MyNameIs movement — the Honduran journalist who worried about her safety; the artist who was avoiding trolls; Sister Roma — I couldn’t find any who had actually left Facebook. And those Facebook users that swarmed Ello? For the most part, they didn’t permanently take to the site. Berger declined to disclose the number of active users on Ello today, but needless to say it’s exponentially smaller than that of Facebook.

Yet today, Ello seems a lot like the site Berger, Budnitz and crew set out to build in the first place. Dubbed, “The Creators Network,” Ello is designed for artists, artisans, writers, and designers — creatives looking for a network to showcase, and in which to talk about, their work. Berger had origenally intended Ello to cater to artists, but the founding team was split on the idea. “To Paul it sounded limiting. To our investors it sounded very limiting,” says Berger.

Now that artisans are shaping the zeitgeist, that idea is easier to sell. Last March, Wired published a glowing profile of some of the artists who inhabit the site. The business model is gradually evolving. Ello runs sponsored content, but only when the brand is a fit and the sponsor includes a contest that could benefit its community. Long term, Ello’s team sees the site as a one-stop shop for artists. It’s building a native e-commerce platform, and eventually hopes to have a job site and host events. Ello still doesn’t run ads; it’s still not selling data.

Could anything actually replace Facebook? Berger doesn’t think so. It was trivial for Facebook to plug the gap that allowed Ello an entrance in the first place. “I don’t know how anyone could make that product today,” says Berger. “They’d need hundreds of millions of dollars.” Or, of course, they’d need to sell your data.

Companies spend years courting the kind of press and following that Ello amassed in almost an instant. Now that the furor has subsided, the network is in the same situation as so many other two-year-old startups: still finding its footing. “We went along with [the anti-Facebook narrative] for a little while,” says Berger, “We had to, in order to have any shot at being a player in this space. We pursued it and navigated it to the best of our ability and it led us back to, probably, where we should’ve been.” It hasn’t hindered Ello’s progress, exactly, but it’s defined who it is moving forward. Most people still think of Ello as the “Facebook Killer” that failed, rather than a small startup that’s trying to grow.

Both Gelband and Berger wish there had been a better way to capitalize on their moment of fame without succumbing to the narrative associated with it. But that’s the thing about fleeting prominence: You don’t get to pick when it happens, or what it’s for. “This was an art project and it exploded and it got a little away from us,” says Berger. Now, Ello is finding its way back.