Is there a way to tell whether or not your instance is blocked from other instances? #AskMastodon
@darryl
Hopefully you'll get a more complete answer, but my understanding is:
There is a tool that will somehow dig in and figure that out. I don't know what the tool is myself, I've seen at least one person who used the tool accused of " using a kiwifarms tool ", so there is some drama around it apparently.
If you do a web search on "Fediblock", you'll find various lists of commonly blocked servers, sometimes with counts of how many other servers block them and why and so on. Sadly, some server admins just lazily use these as lists of servers to block, so it gets to be sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Qoto in particular is unfortunately blocked by some admins merely for not blocking other servers enough itself. I find this awfully silly, and would not want to be on a server whose admin took it upon themselves to prevent all of their users from interacting with another site for such a reason.
@ceoln Actually that's why I was asking. I had an unusual follower loss in my migration and my feed seems to have lost a lot of the instance names I saw a lot around #gamedev, for example. For all its merits, I think this sort of blocking feudalism will be what prevents Mastodon from mainstream success.
@ceoln
That's a good point. The Fediverse very much 'is what it is'.
@darryl
It's also not clear that Mastodon as an entity is all that interested in mainstream success. :)
I've been very much enjoying #qoto, but of course if there's some other server that better suits your interests there's apparently no real barrier to moving.