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1. Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2019 12:50:06 UTC Nolan

   • Nolan

   "Challenges in the Decentralised Web: The Mastodon Case" (PDF) https://emilianodc.com/PAPERS/mastodonIMC19.pdf

   Interesting academic paper analyzing the fediverse and how different instances and users are connected to one another. It's cool that the Mastodon API is open enough that researchers can do this kind of work.

   • Ruby Rhod repeated this.
   • Ruby Rhod (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2019 15:43:29 UTC Ruby Rhod

     • Ruby Rhod
     @nolan we made it into a whitepaper, but this is... not well researched
     
     "Instances. We first extracted a global list of instance URLs and availability statistics from a dump provided by the mnm.social website. This site contains a comprehensive index of instances around the world, allowing us to compile a set of 4,328 unique in- stances (identifed by their domain). These instances primarily run the Mastodon server software, although 3.1% run the Pleroma soft- ware (https://pleroma.social/) instead. This is because, since 2017, these two implementations have federated together using the same front-end and federation protocol (ActivityPub). Hence, from a user’s perspective, there is little difference between using Mastodon or Pleroma instances."
   • Ruby Rhod (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2019 15:47:23 UTC Ruby Rhod

     • Ruby Rhod
     @nolan haha wow how did these guys get away without being cancelled?
     
     "Toots. In May 2018, we crawled all available toots across the in- stances. To compile a list of instances to crawl, we started with the list collected via the mnm.social website. We then filtered these to only leave instances that were online during May 2018: this left 1.75K active instances which were accessible. This obviously re- veals a degree of churn in the instance population; across the 15 month measurement cycle 21.3% of instance went offline and never came back online. We wrote a multi-threaded crawler to connect with each of these 1.75K instances, via their API, and collected their entire history of toots."
     
     This kind of research will not be possible in the future for Mastodon. Sad.
   • Ruby Rhod (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2019 16:26:34 UTC Ruby Rhod

     • Marcin Cieślak
     • Ruby Rhod
     @saper @nolan Mischaracterization of Pleroma, the author thinks default FE in Pleroma is identical to Mastodon but it's not. Even when using the MastoFE on Pleroma some links like user settings open PleromaFE, so it's misleading to say it's just a different way of using the Mastodon interface.