Hey, #admins!

[rwg@aoir.social]

Hey, #admins!

Along with a grad student, I am working on a paper the surveys Mastodon (and forks -- Hometown, Glitch) servers that have some connection to #Canada.

We have done a lot of digging and have found ~40 instances that have some connection to Canada. We presented our work recently:

https://robertwgehl.org/presentations/CanadaFediASM.html#1

But! Maybe we're missing some. If you are willing to share, please let me know if your Mastodon/fork instance meets this criteria.

Boosts appreciated!

[bwacton@mastodon.social]

@rwg hi have you contacted Socialbc? Do you want individuals servers with Canada?

[rwg@aoir.social]

@Bwacton Social.bc is definitely on our list!

We are excluding "instances of one" from our survey. We're interested in:
* Canada-wide instances (e.g., mstdn.ca). We are pretty certain we have found all these, but you never know.
* Regional instances (e.g., socialbc.ca)
* 'special interest' instances with some explicit connection to Canada. So maybe the description notes it's located in Canada, or the admin is Canadian. This is a trickier category, obviously.

[bookandswordblog@scholar.social]

@rwg FYI mastodonserver.ca was recently (last few weeks) adopted and revitalized by the admins of socialbc.ca Would be glad to see your list of servers before I make suggestions.

[rwg@aoir.social]

@bookandswordblog sure!

We also have developed a categorization scheme that might be useful for mastodonserver.ca.

[bookandswordblog@scholar.social]

@rwg tagging @chris

[bookandswordblog@scholar.social]

@rwg scholar.social is run out of Quebec

[rwg@aoir.social]

@bookandswordblog Indeed! That was my home instance for a long time -- we included it.

[julian@activitypub.space]

rwg@aoir.social limited to Mastodon and forks only?

Pixelfed dev is from Canada, as are the NodeBB guys (aka me).

[rwg@aoir.social]

@julian Yes, only to keep things focused. We figure after we develop a categorization scheme for Mastodon, we could repeat it for other systems.

Indeed, in doing this I've come across a bunch of new Ghost instances with explicit ties to Canada.

[scott@mastodon.clitheroe.ca]

@rwg I went through your slide deck - I like it! Personally, I think the "servers of one" cadre of Canadians deserves some mention - and not because I want my dot on the map :) But rather, because we stand alongside our larger Canadian instance colleagues as full peers and partners in independence from mainstream foreign social media.

If nothing else, it's important to note and promote that community, in a fediverse context, can be as small as a neighborhood block, or even one house :)

[rwg@aoir.social]

@scott Agreed! We talk about servers of one in the full paper, but for the presentation, I didn't have time. One issue I constantly face is that my audiences still may not really know what the fediverse is, so explaining instances can get tricky.

[cbielstein@techhub.social]

@rwg I liked the presentation. Maybe I missed the list of servers, so I apologize if I'm repeating... But do you have TechHub.social?

[rwg@aoir.social]

@cbielstein No! Thank you!

[ricci@discuss.systems]

@rwg

Here's a list of Fediverse instances that are physically located in Canada. Of course, being physically located there doesn't necessarily mean it meets your criteria, and there are almost certainly servers that meet your criteria that are physically located outside the country. But, here's a big list (789 instances) if it's of any use :)

https://owncloud.ricci.io/s/8T9wdgu8G0gdxSr

[rwg@aoir.social]

Just wanted to thank everyone! With your help we found a handful of new instances we missed.

All told we're pretty confident there are 56 Mastodon instances with a strong connection to Canada. We think our method could easily be expanded to account for other software, too. Ghost and GoToSocial, for example, or older systems like PeerTube.