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@jae @dcc @mint @nyanide @pwm @sun @newsmast Incidentally, brief update on this while I'm thinking about it. A couple of days ago, I tried to figure out how they are getting posts from FSE, since no one on newsmast.social is following anyone on FSE.

Despite having an entire instance to federate with, they actually use a scraper that fetches not just posts but also tries to get followers/following lists (which they might just do for user discovery, but see the attached PDF; incidentally, they insist in that PDF and elsewhere on their blog that they're not scraping, but my log files say otherwise: they get posts by sending requests to the outbox endpoint, and then when they've gotten those, they look at the following/followers endpoints). Probably scraped a decent chunk of fedi: people put newsmast.community onto their blocklists, but this doesn't stop backend.newsmast.org from scraping them.

The codebase is actually a pile of code fragments demonstrating their API endpoints; it's just an incomplete Rails application, basically useless on its own and produced by some offshore guys (Myanmar, according to https://www.newsmastfoundation.org/about-us/our-team/ ): https://github.com/newsmast22/mammoth . They claim to use the "Oliphant" blocklist at https://www.newsmastfoundation.org/our-blog/reimagining-the-fediverse/ . They were apparently founded in response to the war in Ukraine and Elon buying Twitter, or at least that's what they claim: https://www.newsmastfoundation.org/about-us/our-story/ .

If you want a conspiracy theory, speaking of Ukraine, the updates to their codebase slowed to a trickle in October (only one commit after 2024-10-10), same time nafo.uk stopped responding ( https://fedilist.com/instance/nafo.uk "Last successful contact: 2024-10-20"). Looks like they bought indieweb.social also: https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/03/27/the-next-stage-for-indiewebsocial.html .
Mapping-Fediverse-Communities-1.pdf

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