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For two weeks, a client from China's state-run academic network queried our Mastodon instance for who follows whom. Not content — relationships. No project description exists anywhere. Here is what we found, and how to check your own instance.

Blog post:
https://www.martinmuc.de/blog/crawler-who-follows-whom/

Mastodon post:
https://muenchen.social/@martinmuc/117144806957574027

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[-] RedSnt@feddit.dk 4 points 5 days ago

They could've just asked nicely I guess. But who even knows if it really was for academic research..

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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