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.
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.
| server | posts, 12 weeks | trend | monthly actives | software |
|---|
| newsmast.community | 902,468 | | 62 | mastodon |
| mastodon.scot | 187,651 | | 1448 | mastodon |
| mastodonapp.uk | 152,900 | | 2050 | mastodon |
| universeodon.com | 126,267 | | 1902 | mastodon |
| toot.wales | 57,259 | | 639 | mastodon |
| mastodon.me.uk | 53,846 | | 472 | mastodon |
| mastodon.radio | 34,506 | | 762 | mastodon |
| sportsfeed.me | 26,728 | | 58 | mastodon |
| torturedsouls.com | 16,764 | | 1 | mastodon |
| mstdn.science | 16,694 | | 435 | mastodon |
| gamepad.club | 13,041 | | 120 | mastodon |
| mastodon.org.uk | 10,940 | | 154 | mastodon |
| scicomm.xyz | 7,581 | | 178 | mastodon |
| mstdn.crmbl.uk | 7,240 | | 9 | mastodon |
| glasgow.social | 7,148 | | 312 | mastodon |
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.