I believe there are quite a lot of techies on this instance so:

I have always used Google Chrome to access qoto.org then the other day my running Mastodon instance in that browser shut down for no reason I can think of, and when I tried to log back in to it, Bitdefender resolutely refused to allow me to do that saying that destination page I had requested was riddled with malware and would download all sorts of hideous code on to my machine if I went there!

I run 6 assorted browsers all of which come under the Bitdefender umbrella of protection, so I tried a different browser namely Brave, and qoto.org loaded without protest from my antivirus as indeed it did in all my other browsers; it seems only Chrome is impacted by this issue.

I am wondering therefore if it possible that some malware that redirects requests to go to qoto.org, to a malware site, has installed itself under Chrome on this machine.

Are there any any experts out there who can suggest what this problem might be, particularly if it could be a malware problem!