Fediverse Jurisdiction Observatory

Which laws apply to the fediverse?

Every tracker in this space publishes one country per server. For much of the network there is no such thing — and where there is, it often is not the one the domain name implies. This observatory resolves hosting independently, reads what each operator says about its own governing law, and publishes the disagreement instead of hiding it.

1,273servers measured
28jurisdictions implicated
385link to more than one
14have no single answer
315origin hidden by a CDN
49we disagree with the tracker
767domain asserts a country
16declare a minimum age
13cite a regulator
34have a public registrant

Jurisdiction is not a partition

A server counts towards every jurisdiction it has a link with, so these columns deliberately do not sum to the network. 385 servers link to more than one country, and 14 have two or more tied on equal evidence — for those, no primary country is recorded, because inventing one would be the error this project exists to document.

jurisdictionservers linkedhosted thereby domain suffixnames its lawprimary formonthly actives
United Kingdom GB12736787312298815379
United States US1189624932175
Netherlands NL109891183229
Germany DE735036423247
France FR55123418965
Finland FI13120097
Canada CA10800587
Ireland IE712033
Spain ES706135
Portugal PT660045
Indonesia ID404003
Poland PL303003

All jurisdictions →

What the servers actually carry

Posts per week, from each server's own twelve-week activity series. A better measure than monthly actives, which counts anyone who logged in without posting.

serverposts, 12 weekstrendmonthly activessoftware
newsmast.community902,46862mastodon
mastodon.scot187,6511448mastodon
mastodonapp.uk152,9002050mastodon
universeodon.com126,2671902mastodon
toot.wales57,259639mastodon
mastodon.me.uk53,846472mastodon
mastodon.radio34,506762mastodon
sportsfeed.me26,72858mastodon
torturedsouls.com16,7641mastodon
mstdn.science16,694435mastodon
gamepad.club13,041120mastodon
mastodon.org.uk10,940154mastodon
scicomm.xyz7,581178mastodon
mstdn.crmbl.uk7,2409mastodon
glasgow.social7,148312mastodon

Who is accountable

Registration records answer "who runs this domain" for 34 of these servers. Everything else is redacted or unanswered, and 490 share an address with another server — many are customers of a handful of managed hosts rather than independent operators.

Infrastructure and accountability →

254 servers publish their software's shipped privacy policy unchanged — a document that says "If this server is in the US…", "If this server is in the EU or the EEA…", and concedes that "Law requirements can be different if this server is in another jurisdiction." An operator who has not edited it has not formed a view about which law applies to them. See Method.