The Gates are Closing: Why Mastodon’s Flagship Instances are Hiding Their Timelines

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While checking my Discover the Fediverse (DiscoverFedi) app to ensure everything was running smoothly, I noticed something significant. At some point in the last couple of months—perhaps even longer—mastodon.social and mastodon.online made the move to hide their public timelines entirely.

I’m not entirely sure why they made this decision, but it’s a little worrying. These are flagship instances that new users are pointed to by default by almost everyone, including the mainline “Join the Fediverse” websites. Personally, I find it off-putting when you can’t look “inside” an instance to get a feel for the community before joining.

Because of these changes, the landing page for DiscoverFedi was suddenly broken, displaying a jarring error message. It’s never a good look when users navigate to your app and see an error that makes it appear as though mastodon.social has ceased to exist!

The Fix: Pivoting to the Trending Endpoint

To resolve this, I’ve updated DiscoverFedi to default to mstdn.jp (a large Japanese instance) on the landing page, as they currently have no plans to hide their public timelines. More importantly, I’ve implemented a fallback system to prevent errors when navigating to any instance that has restricted its view.

Enter: The Trending Endpoint.

Now, when you use DiscoverFedi to check out an instance, the app follows a specific logic path:

1. It checks for a Public Timeline.
2. If that fails, it tries the Local Timeline.
3. If that also fails, it pulls from the Trending endpoint.

Only if all three alternatives fail will the app display an error message.

I suspect this shift toward “hidden” timelines has something to do with the current political climate or aggressive bot scraping, but I wish there had been more transparency when it happened. As of right now, I still have no idea exactly when these instances made this change.

Regardless, DiscoverFedi is back to functioning as intended—just with a little more resilience built into the code.