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Currently, the The Mastodon network - with its 3 Million accounts distributed over +3000 currently 4.4 million active accounts on +4000 servers - is widely regarded as one of the most successful alternative online social network projects yet. Since its inception, the network keeps evolving rapidly, and its decentralized nature poses novel challenges to any statistical network health analysis yet:

https://joinmastodon.org

Unlike Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok - this service is NOT based on manipulative strategies like targeted advertising and algorithmic outrage maximisation - which are posing imminent threats to democracies worldwide - and for this reason, the network keeps evolving rapidly.

→ However, its decentralized nature creates exciting challenges for monitoring "network health".

Your task is to:

1. Conduct research on the current state-of-the-art in monitoring of federated network statistics (e.g. nr. of posts per instance over time, blocking events, outages...)
2. Apply your insights and ingenuity to help improving
3. Research the current SOTA in mastodon/fediverse network monitoring.
4. Apply those insights and your ingenuity to improve the situation, e.g.
   
   
   1. Aggregation of publicly available statistical data (via mastodon server APIs)
   2. Setup implement a public monitoring service directory
   3. come up with alternative solutions to the current economic model for network health services

1. 1. - similar to https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/instance-monitoring-sites
   2. Propose new ideas on "how to measure network health" of a federated online social network

Further reading: https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon

Further watching: https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-857362-die_rosarote_brille_des_fediverse

PS: Network health monitoring always needs to be done with ethical considerations in mind.