Infrastructure and accountability

Who can actually be identified as running these servers, whose machines they sit on, and what else lives alongside them.

Almost nobody can be identified from the registry

Registration data is where you would expect to find out who runs a domain. For this network it is a dead end: 34 of 49,378 servers — 0.1% — have a registrant country in the public record. 508 come back explicitly redacted, and 664 produce no registry answer at all.

That is not a criticism of the registries; post-GDPR redaction is deliberate and correct. But it means the domain record cannot answer "who is responsible for this service", which is the first question any regulator has to ask.

Servers are not independent of each other

24,887 answer on an address shared with at least one other. Sharing an address is not proof of a shared operator — most large clusters are customers of a managed host — so the distinct-contact count sits beside it. Many servers and one contact is a single operator; many contacts is a hosting product.

Shared contact addresses

A published contact repeated across servers is much stronger evidence of common control than a shared IP, because the operator chose to put it there.

Where the fediverse is hosted

Registrars

What else lives on these domains

864 hostnames beyond the servers themselves across 696 domains — object storage, media buckets, status pages, staging hosts and mail. Each server's page lists its own.

Coverage begins when the scanner was switched on and does not predate 2026, so a domain with no names here has not been observed. That is not the same as having no certificates.