Federation Network

Last updated Feb 28, 2023

Analyze Mastodons federation network.

Plan: Use the API to lookup admin accounts of other servers. If they can be reached, they do not block each other.

• Extracted 59879 instances from instances.social

• From these, 8647 instances fulfill the following properties:
  • Likely Mastodon instances.
  • Allow access to the /api/v2/search endpoint
  • Not dead and up.
  • At least one active user.
  • Have an admin specified.

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db.instances.count_documents(
    {
        "search_result.type": {"$exists": False},
        "search_result.error": {"$regex": "param"},
        "dead": False,
        "up": True,
        "users": {"$gte": 1},
        "active_users": {"$gte": 1},
        "admin": {"$ne": None},
    }
)

• It seems that no results while searching does not correspond to blocking/being blocked by the server.