Domain blocks are an important tool that keeps the fediverse safe. (And a source of a few controversies.)
Consider this scenario: You run a fediverse community. You define rules that everyone respects and follows, and everything is going well. But the fediverse is made up of tens of thousands of servers, each with their own rules. And they’re not all here to play nice. If a member of your community gets harassed by someone from another community, they can be reported, but what if that community protects, or even encourages such behavior? That’s where the domain blocks come in.
Imagine being able to block off whole parts of Twitter/X!
Mastodon servers have the instance/domain_blocks API endpoint, which shows a full list of blocked domains, enabled by default, with an option, to hide it to prevent potential abuse. goToSocial initially hides this list, but lets you enable it. Hubzilla servers may list this information on their /siteinfo page. Other platforms don’t let you share it at all.
With this in mind, I analyzed 29,450 fediverse servers collected by fedilist.com, out of which 11,084 list their domain blocks publicly, to get some insights.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
- mastodon.social with 1,979,646 registered users has been blocked by 47 servers with a total of 67,875 users
- misskey.io with 537,592 registered users has been blocked by 109 servers with a total of 2,435,031 users
- mstdn.jp with 406,410 registered users has been blocked by 140 servers with a total of 148,526 users
- mastodon.cloud with 274,586 registered users has been blocked by 57 servers with a total of 77,056 users
- mstdn.social with 228,583 registered users has been blocked by 23 servers with a total of 11,428 users
- mastodon.online with 191,901 registered users has been blocked by 27 servers with a total of 14,378 users
- mastodon.world with 182,919 registered users has been blocked by 37 servers with a total of 90,302 users
- mas.to with 173,859 registered users has been blocked by 10 servers with a total of 5,096 users
- micro.blog with 167,952 registered users has been blocked by 2 servers with a total of, 10 users
- lemmy.world with 159,332 registered users has been blocked by 5 servers with a total of 3,489 users
One surprising discovery for me is that mastodon.social, the flagship community set up and maintained by the creators of Mastodon, which is a home to nearly two million accounts, and is often criticized as a “threat” to the decentralized nature of the fediverse, too difficult to properly moderate, and has been a source of waves of spam in the past, is not much more likely to be blocked compared to other large servers I looked at.
- “Too much activity.”
- “Too big and too poorly moderated.”
- “Complete absence of moderation.”
- “Ineffective moderation.”
These are just some of the notes fediverse admins wrote about mastodon.social. Understandably, the size of the server creates a dilemma between wanting to protect users and allowing them to stay connected to their many friends and accounts hosted there.