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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 2:29 AM

    What would happen to your timeline if mastodon.social went away?

    (Reposting my tool that helps you figure this out.)

    mastodon.social is the biggest server on the , with over 21% of accounts, and an even higher percentage of accounts.

    But what does that mean to you, personally? Let's say it went away tomorrow - (assuming you aren't on it yourself), how much of your timeline would vanish?

    In my case, it turns out - not a lot, actually! The biggest sources of posts that I see are (1) a very small instance that doesn't even federate with much of the Fediverse, but many of my friends are there, (2) my own instance, (3) a large tech-focused instance that is still much smaller than mastodon.social. The big guy is only 5% of the post I've seen recently.

    But this might be different for you!

    Find out for yourself at moderation-explorer.online/ . Use 'advanced mode' to see this analysis, since you need to log into see your actual feed.

    You might even decide to try moving to an instance that you're more connected to?

    (It's explained more on the site, but all the work happens in your browser, I don't see your identity, auth tokens, posts that get loaded, none of it.)

    Image summarizing the last 800 messages on my Mastodon feed. types.pl is the top one, with 17%. Mastodon.social is fourth, at 5% of posts.
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Replies

  • Dan Portsdan
    Aug 14, 2026, 2:43 AM

    @ricci continuing to appreciate that it understands who really moderates discuss.systems

    screenshot showing Miso the cat as the moderator
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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 2:44 AM

    @dan glad you found the easter egg, I override the instance image for exactly one (1) instance

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  • Dan Portsdan
    Aug 14, 2026, 2:46 AM

    @ricci the administrator hard at work moderating

    Miso sitting at my desk
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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 2:47 AM

    @dan Miso! Why I gotta jump on these reports so fast? Help a brother out!

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  • WintergreenWintergr33n@lingo.lol
    Aug 14, 2026, 3:02 AM

    @ricci

    I have it blocked.

    Fewer trolls. Fewer spammers. Fewer people who are only on Mastodon to sell stuff.

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  • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me
    Aug 14, 2026, 3:33 AM
    @ricci Wow, I got a *lot* of dead instances in the Followers/Following stats, but well kind of expected given how long my instance has been there (2018) and how long I've been on fedi (2013).

    But otherwise m.s isn't in the top 10 of my timeline:
    screen.png
    screen.png
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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 3:34 AM

    @lanodan yeah, it can be pretty surprising to see the actual numbers!

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  • groxxgroxx@hachyderm.io
    Aug 14, 2026, 3:42 AM

    @ricci <10% following, and 0% feed. Sounds about right - most of the mega-site accounts I follow are for products/companies where I'm interested in update summaries only, and not enough to follow their blog on rss (roughly quarterly toots).

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  • groxxgroxx@hachyderm.io
    Aug 14, 2026, 3:45 AM

    @ricci It probably helps that my 24h feed is only about 30 posts, and this was a relatively active day - I read it all, so 50+ is definitely too much.

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 3:46 AM

    @groxx oh wow you have a more curated feed than me, I hit the 800 limit for posts in the masto timeline API before I hit 24h

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 3:45 AM

    @groxx Yeah from other responses, it seems like relatively low actual traffic from m.s is not unusual.

    Though quite possibly, I'm most directly connected to "fringe folks" who are less likely to be strongly connected to m.s, and/or these are the sort of folks who are more likely to give the tool a try

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  • groxxgroxx@hachyderm.io
    Aug 14, 2026, 3:49 AM

    @ricci I'll throw in a "probably both", which includes me :)

    I like mastodon for the same reason I liked early Twitter: niche nerds being neat. I don't like the fast-flowing feed of popular stuff all the time, because then I miss stuff the neat nerds wanted to tell me - when I want that, I just check the popular feed.
    And the people I follow do a very good job of boosting interesting stuff into my feed, which is how I get occasional stuff from you :blobfoxheartcute:

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 3:54 AM

    @groxx yeah boosting is great, there are some very big, fairly active accounts here that I don't follow, not because I don't like them (I do) but because their "greatest hits" get boosted into my feed, and that's good enough for me!

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  • groxxgroxx@hachyderm.io
    Aug 14, 2026, 4:00 AM

    @ricci yep, that's how I like it. collaborative curation at its finest. I'd love to try a platform that really leans into that... but mastodon exists and gets pretty close for me so far.

    one of these days I really need to build a mastodon app that's fraidyc.at flavored, because that's pretty close to what I want. the Twitter-theming is a pure negative imo, but the people here make up for it.

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  • River 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️riverpunk@defcon.social
    Aug 14, 2026, 3:55 AM

    @ricci Looks like I've got a somewhat high dependence on mastodon.social. Not dangerous, but maybe in the yellow "worry zone" of a scale.

    I wonder how many folks on mastodon.social might eventually switch instances... I'm not sure how much I need to actually worry about this problem tbh

    A table showing that 10.4%, or 83 of the posts on me feed come from mastodon.social. This is in second place, beaten only by chaos.social with 10.5% or 85 posts. After that, several other instances are there, but with a severe drop-off around 5% or less for everything else.
    A chart showing mastodon.social is the instance where I follow the most amount of users. I follow 12.3% or 32 users on that instance. In second place is hachyderm.io with 6.2% or 16 users, and most other instances have 5% or less.
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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 4:00 AM

    @riverpunk Yeah I don't know. To be clear, I don't expect it to go away :) this is just one fairly accessible datapoint to get towards understanding the structural risks in the Fediverse

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  • River 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️riverpunk@defcon.social
    Aug 14, 2026, 4:04 AM

    @ricci the nice thing is that as long as our feeds remain mostly populated by non-m.s users, they will have no incentive to take over the network, since they would be shooting themselves in the foot if they did.

    It's only when a *lot* of users are seeing high values, around 70% or more. At that point, they have a critical mass and can do something. Heck, even if there's lots of people on m.s, if they follow people *outside* of m.s, it provides a kind of insurance, since they're likely to jump ship if they can no longer see posts from the cool people they follow.

    Not to say we shouldn't worry, but we should definitely understand the mechanisms of how enshittification would take place in a federated system with a high-power node.

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  • NaClKnight 🧂⚔️🥊NaClKnight@c.im
    Aug 14, 2026, 7:43 AM

    @ricci

    This is hella interesting. Thank you!
    I grabbed screenshots of the tables that looked informative.

    I interact less with .social than the 'average' user but it's still the biggest source of follows, followers, and posts. I wouldn't think of muting that server.

    I picked c.im because it has reasonable rules about NSFW material and chill mods and a huge character count. I admittedly don't use the local feed except by accident.

    None of the special interest servers I've seen fit my personality, interests, or location. fgc.network comes closest but it's so tiny that I miss out on many of the replies to posts that I see.

    screenshot breaking down the servers of my 370 accounts followed and 615 followers. Mastodon.Social leads both categories at between 10-20 percent.
    Screenshot breaking down the percent of my followers from a given server compared to the overall population. I have slightly fewer ties to dot social and much more connection to mas.to, c.im, mastodon.art and fgc.network than the average user.
    screenshot showing that 19% of my posts viewed in the last 24 hours have come from mastodon.social, more than twice the next most common source (mas.to)
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  • Arena Cops 🇺🇦✌ArenaCops@infosec.exchange
    Aug 16, 2026, 9:23 PM

    @NaClKnight @ricci Pls let me remind folks: The thief-in-chief's (un)truth[dot](anti)social is also a .social, an offshoot built on stolen Mastodon code, and as such potentially capable of intruding the fediverse, if permitted. 🤨🤔✋️

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  • Baroness WinterBaronessWinter@beige.party
    Aug 14, 2026, 9:05 AM

    @ricci I would lose... a few posts from a few folks. Not nearly enough to make me complain, should mastodon.social get the DeFedi from beige.party. I believe it was already DeFederated from my old instance, dice.camp. Folks on mastodon.social really should find a better instance (and we should help them do so, joyfully, not scoldingly).

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  • Мя mo@mastodon.ml
    Aug 14, 2026, 9:49 AM

    @ricci question: does it count lists? I use a few lists with «exclude from home timeline» option, so counting only home timeline is not very representative

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 10:08 AM

    @mo It hits the `timelines/home` API, which I *think* is the same one used for home timeline in the web interface and most other clients. So I *think* it's excluding your lists.

    I should probably add a very simple timeline view to make this easier to tell

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 10:11 AM

    @mo I think that would be fairly complicated, I think I'd have to crawl the home timeline, all list timelines, and deduplicate stuff that appears in more than one :)

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  • Мя mo@mastodon.ml
    Aug 14, 2026, 10:21 AM

    @ricci hmmmm... where would be better to send you a pull request? I have both GitHub and Codeberg

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 10:34 AM

    @mo sure! we'd want to be a bit careful about not blindly pulling all lists since that could make the whole thing take a long time if someone has a lot of them (and not necessarily helpful if they don't have them exclude as you do) but I'm sure we can figure something reasonable out

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 10:35 AM

    @mo Oh and let's do codeberg

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 10:35 AM

    @mo already have another one submitted there that I need to look at

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  • patterpatterfloof@meow.social
    Aug 14, 2026, 9:53 AM

    @ricci there's so many instances that block mastodon.social because it's bot the public swimming pool & cesspool

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  • Paco Hopepaco@infosec.exchange
    Aug 14, 2026, 12:03 PM

    @ricci Neat-o. Turns out the big dot social is pretty important to me. It’s number 2 in people who follow me, and number 1 for people I follow. Having said that, it’s a long, LONG tail. The top 3 servers I’m interacting with account for 30-40% of my feed. The rest of my feed is servers who each contribute less than 2%.

    Armed with this knowledge, and a $1 bill, I should be able to get a drink from a vending machine. 😛

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 5:10 PM

    @paco in 2026? unlikely, Paco, we are old.

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  • Steven "thx" Kimthanksstevenkim@vivaldi.net
    Aug 14, 2026, 1:32 PM

    @ricci Interesting. My main account mostly follows people in the Korean Fediverse, and quite a few of the instances they use aren't Mastodon instances at all. That's probably why the tool doesn't show population data for some of them — many of them run Misskey or Misskey-derived software. (Misskey is Fediverse software from Japan, and it's particularly popular in Japan and South Korea.)

    I'm also fascinated by how many people seem to join mastodon.social simply because it has "Mastodon" in the name, even though the Fediverse is much bigger than mastodon.social — or even Mastodon as a piece of software.

    So I guess mastodon.social can be very important to some people while barely mattering to others.

    I used to wonder, "What's the point of having separate servers if you're not really allowed to change much visually?" But I suppose the differences are more about rules, community focus, and moderation policies. In my own experience, though, I don't come across that many servers built around a very specific theme or subject.

    You saw 800 posts from 108 accounts on 52 servers Server Posts Percent Population yodangang.express 87 109% -% planet.moe 83 104% 0.254 % misskey.io 81 101% -% bakedbean.xyz 44 55% 0.001 % ighina.org 40 5.0% -% eternal-blue.xyz 39 4.9% -% pointless.chat 32 40% 0.007 % buttersc.one 28 35% -% trpg-o.xyz 28 3.5% 0.006 % sharlayan.in 24 3.0% 0.001 %
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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 5:09 PM

    @thanksstevenkim sharlayan spotted! 👀

    But yeah, these are all good discussion points and questions - I want to give people the tools to add some data to the other perspectives on them

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  • Steven "thx" Kimthanksstevenkim@vivaldi.net
    Aug 14, 2026, 5:57 PM

    @ricci I genuinely appreciate all the work you’ve put into this. It gave me a new perspective on the Fediverse, and I think it’ll help other people see it differently too.☺️

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  • Steven "thx" Kimthanksstevenkim@vivaldi.net
    Aug 14, 2026, 6:12 PM

    @ricci Maybe a portal site for all of these would be a good idea. Or maybe you could turn them into widgets instead of collecting more domain names. 😂

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  • Rob Ricciricci
    Aug 14, 2026, 4:54 PM

    @sberson That's correct, sorry - it uses the mastodon APIs.

    I think that the basic mode could probably work with raw ActivityPub if you make follows/followers public; I've been wanting to do some work in AP to learn it better, I'll add this to the idea list.

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