Vol. I · Fri, 2 Oct 2026Open 24 hours · Feeding: continuous · Please do not tap the glass
Plate XLI0xBAC98D2AUNREAD
Kingdom Automata›Phylum HTTP›Order Fetchers›Family Link Unfurlers›Species Mastodon
Specimen file · Link-Preview Petting Zoo

Mastodon

Mammut foederatum

What is Mastodon?

Fetches link previews for Mastodon servers. Every server fetches its own copy. It is operated by Fediverse servers and identifies itself as Mastodon.

Temperament: collective. One post, two hundred servers, two hundred visits. They do not coordinate. It is a matter of principle.

Operator
Fediverse servers
Conservation status
Has not read the rules
First seen
Not yet
Last seen
Not yet
Visits today
0
This week
0
All time
0
Caught in the trap
Never
How to block Mastodon ↓
§ I.

Identification

Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:

User-Agent
$ http.rb/5.1.1 (Mastodon/4.2.8; +https://mastodon.social/)

Fediverse servers does not publish a way to verify Mastodon's traffic. Treat its user agent as a claim, not proof: anyone can send it. Read Fediverse servers's documentation.

§ II.

How to block Mastodon

Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from Mastodon's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.

robots.txt
# Block Mastodon from the whole site
User-agent: Mastodon
Disallow: /

Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:

# Let it in, but keep it out of one room
User-agent: Mastodon
Allow: /
Disallow: /members/
§ III.

Observed behaviour

Visits, last 30 dayspeak 1 / day
3 Sept 2026today
Diet · pages most often eaten

Nothing on record in the last 30 days.

Visiting hours
00h – 11h12h – 23h
robots.txt compliance
100.0%

Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 0 requests. Never read robots.txt.

Trap Room record
Clean

Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.

§ IV.

Where it comes from

The networks Mastodon's visits came from:

Nothing on record in the last 30 days.

Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.

§ V.

Questions site owners ask

Does Mastodon respect robots.txt?

We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.

Will blocking Mastodon hurt my search rankings?

No. But links to your site will be shared without a title or preview image, which tends to get fewer clicks.

How often does Mastodon visit?

Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.