Hello and welcome to the Tuesday, December 20th, 2020 edition of the Santonet Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, and I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Well, if you want to be ready for Christmas dinner with family, you probably need to brush up on Mastodon, which seems to be the hot topic these days around dinner tables.

And Xavier has a little write-up here about finding Mastodon servers.

Mastodon, well, actually earlier in chat, someone reminded me it feels kind of like the good old BBS, the bulletin board system, where you had various distinct systems that were operated often by individuals that were joined together in a network.

That's really sort of how Mastodon kind of operates. The challenge here

in identifying Mastodon servers is that it's not like Twitter, Facebook and such, where you

have one company, one domain name, or a certain range of IP address that you have to worry about.

But Mastodon servers can be pretty much anywhere.

They can be inside your network if an enterprising, cisadmin or such, set one up for their own

community. So it can be a little bit more difficult to identify them. And of course,

at least the way they're exposed, really just

the web servers.

Luckily, since these Mastodon servers are linked to each other, there are APIs out there,

and one server in particular, instances.social makes that available that allows you to get

a list of all of the host names

or domain names that are being used by known Massadon servers that are linked to instances.

Dot social.

Again, remember, these are only the servers that instance not social knows about.

The way Macedon works, you don't have to tell anybody that you're related. the servers that instance of social knows about the way

mastodon works, you don't have to tell anybody

that you're running a particular server

...