Is there a way to see which instances a Mastodon instance has defederated with? For lemmy instances, for example, you can go to /instances to see a list of other connected and blocked instances.
Lemmy uses a feature called “groups” to denote the community a post is in. Mastodon doesn’t support groups yet. Once it does, I would think those posts may federate with Lemmy.
My understanding is that the ‘all’ feed only shows posts that come from accounts followed by people on your instance. You can follow anyone from any federated instance; and when you do, their posts will appear in your personal feed, and also in the ‘all’ feed for everyone on your instance. People are aren’t followed by anyone on your instance won’t show up in the ‘all’ section.
I’ve believe I’ve seen something like that stated before, but we’re talking *zero* mastodon content showing up in ALL. Which happens to be the same instance as yours, btw, with Lemm.ee being the third largest instance in the Lemmysphere. You’d expect at least a little mastodon content showing up, but there’s just nothing.
So far the two resources just don’t seem to be mixing, so perhaps what the other person was saying is correct. Right now in order to search mastodon, I’m using this tool.
That list shows all instances that your instance is kinda sorta maybe aware of.
For example, if I searched the profile link for someone or some group from a Masto instance and didn’t do anything with it, that instance would still get on that list because it asked the Lemmy instance about info on that profile/community.
On desktop there should be a small “about” link in the bottom left, from which there is a “moderated servers” dropdown menu where you can see defederated servers. I don’t see anywhere to view the servers you ARE federated with, but if it’s listed at Mastodon’s official website (whoops, I actually meant this)it’s probably in.
I don’t see anything on the official Masto app, but that app is just missing a ton of functionality in general.
iirc, that’s all down to what accounts your server’s users follow. If any users on server A follow users on server B, and neither A nor B block the other, then A is federated with B.
But how would a user on A find anyone on B before federation? I know Lemmy can initiate federation through the search function just in case you’re the first to look for something on another instance, but I don’t see how that would work on Masto.
It’s done through a similar mechanism, you can paste the URL of a user on a different Mastodon search which triggers the same style of search as it does on Lemmy. Mastodon has relays (an admin needs to add/subscribe to one, and the relay has to confirm/accept) however which can also help “kickstart” Federation so to speak as well - which is like blasting a firehose at an instance.
In addition, I believe that there might be a “viral” component to federation; if users on server A follow users on server B, and users on server B follow users on server C, then server C’s popular posts can show up on server A’s explore page. Is that correct?
If someone on server B were to boost that posts from server C, then yes they’d show up on server A as far as I know - but only if they’re boosted. The federation aspect works a lot like Lemmy’s, so while my instance my federates with lemmy.world (and vice versa), my instance doesn’t know about the communities on LW unless someone on my instance subscribes to that community in particular (and vice-versa for a community on my instance not showing up on LW until someone over there subscribes). At least, that’s how I understand it - to be honest I still don’t have my head completely wrapped around Mastodon’s federation aspect but since both Mastodon and Lemmy use ActivityPub I’d reckon that they’re very similar.
Is there a way to see which instances a Mastodon instance has defederated with? For lemmy instances, for example, you can go to
/instancesto see a list of other connected and blocked instances.I just did, and noticed a bunch of supposedly-federated mastodon instances, but in reality I’ve never seen them in my ‘all’ stream.
Are they not supposed to show up there?
Lemmy uses a feature called “groups” to denote the community a post is in. Mastodon doesn’t support groups yet. Once it does, I would think those posts may federate with Lemmy.
My understanding is that the ‘all’ feed only shows posts that come from accounts followed by people on your instance. You can follow anyone from any federated instance; and when you do, their posts will appear in your personal feed, and also in the ‘all’ feed for everyone on your instance. People are aren’t followed by anyone on your instance won’t show up in the ‘all’ section.
I’ve believe I’ve seen something like that stated before, but we’re talking *zero* mastodon content showing up in ALL. Which happens to be the same instance as yours, btw, with Lemm.ee being the third largest instance in the Lemmysphere. You’d expect at least a little mastodon content showing up, but there’s just nothing.
So far the two resources just don’t seem to be mixing, so perhaps what the other person was saying is correct. Right now in order to search mastodon, I’m using this tool.
Thank you for sharing Fediverse Explorer, super useful!
That list shows all instances that your instance is kinda sorta maybe aware of.
For example, if I searched the profile link for someone or some group from a Masto instance and didn’t do anything with it, that instance would still get on that list because it asked the Lemmy instance about info on that profile/community.
On desktop there should be a small “about” link in the bottom left, from which there is a “moderated servers” dropdown menu where you can see defederated servers. I don’t see anywhere to view the servers you ARE federated with, but if it’s listed at
Mastodon’s official website(whoops, I actually meant this)it’s probably in.I don’t see anything on the official Masto app, but that app is just missing a ton of functionality in general.
iirc, that’s all down to what accounts your server’s users follow. If any users on server A follow users on server B, and neither A nor B block the other, then A is federated with B.
But how would a user on A find anyone on B before federation? I know Lemmy can initiate federation through the search function just in case you’re the first to look for something on another instance, but I don’t see how that would work on Masto.
It’s done through a similar mechanism, you can paste the URL of a user on a different Mastodon search which triggers the same style of search as it does on Lemmy. Mastodon has relays (an admin needs to add/subscribe to one, and the relay has to confirm/accept) however which can also help “kickstart” Federation so to speak as well - which is like blasting a firehose at an instance.
In addition, I believe that there might be a “viral” component to federation; if users on server A follow users on server B, and users on server B follow users on server C, then server C’s popular posts can show up on server A’s explore page. Is that correct?
If someone on server B were to boost that posts from server C, then yes they’d show up on server A as far as I know - but only if they’re boosted. The federation aspect works a lot like Lemmy’s, so while my instance my federates with lemmy.world (and vice versa), my instance doesn’t know about the communities on LW unless someone on my instance subscribes to that community in particular (and vice-versa for a community on my instance not showing up on LW until someone over there subscribes). At least, that’s how I understand it - to be honest I still don’t have my head completely wrapped around Mastodon’s federation aspect but since both Mastodon and Lemmy use ActivityPub I’d reckon that they’re very similar.
That’s exactly the same as lemmy.
FYI the official website is https://joinmastodon.org/servers, not whatever you linked to
Only one I found so far was https://fba.ryona.agency/
The caveat is that it was made by kiwifarms
I’ve used it to quickly check defederated instances but, yeah, kiwifarms is a problem.
Also, look at the GitGud repo
They literally licensed it under an AGPLV3+[n-word] license
There’s defed.xyz as an alternative, but it only tracks defederations between lemmy instances for now.
cool! I’ll check that one out