What is Counter.Social?
At first I thought it was a Mastodon instance but it's not present in instances.social.
I know there's a website at that domain and an app in the Google Play Store, but does anyone know the back story?
I checked Wikipedia and Google and there's very little written about it that I could find.
@FordSubmariner it's a defederated Mastodon instance. Blocks several countries, known for running the most botnets, from accessing it which is why it got defederated. I forget all the exact details, Jester dude that runs it has a Twitter account, at some point he posted a link to a write-up of the back story. IIRC he got flak for blocking countries, big servers here started blocking his server, so he split.
@blackknight95857669 thanks for your detailed reply.
@TheKinrar how does instances.social work? I didn't see a FAQ there. How does it determine whether or not to list a Mastodon instance in its database?
And for anyone, out of curiosity: for any random Mastodon instance, how can I verify that it is indeed Mastodon? Using Chrome on my Android phone, it still isn't obvious to me that counter.social is Mastodon. Maybe I need to use my laptop and load the html source?
I recall that the curses-based Lynx web browser will show the server software that is serving a page. Would that reveal Mastodon software to me?
