Added Mastodon to blocked services

[sandervankasteel]

I've added the top 30 most popular Mastodon servers plus the two "official" instances run by Mastodon gGmbH themselves.

This is list is based on the "total_users" property from Mastodon's own page / API response (https://api.joinmastodon.org/servers).

This PR also might warrant a discussion about grabbing the content of the previously mentioned API call and build that list dynamically upon each Github workflow run due to the federated nature of Mastodon. Which I am more then happy to implement, if needed. ☺️

[ameshkov]

This PR also might warrant a discussion about grabbing the content of the previously mentioned API call and build that list dynamically upon each Github workflow run due to the federated nature of Mastodon. Which I am more then happy to implement, if needed.

Do they often change? Would be great if you can, thank you!

[sandervankasteel]

This PR also might warrant a discussion about grabbing the content of the previously mentioned API call and build that list dynamically upon each Github workflow run due to the federated nature of Mastodon. Which I am more then happy to implement, if needed.

Do they often change? Would be great if you can, thank you!

Due to the federated nature of Mastodon, new instances (and independent instances) are added constantly to the Mastodon network (especially given the current Twitter influx of users).

Just as an FYI, the servers on the previously mentioned endpoint are the instances that adhere to the Mastodon Covenant.
So if a Mastodon instance doesn't want to commit to the Mastodon Covenant it will not be added to the list (or simply does not want to be added to the list).
So it's impossible to 100% block all instances, but this should cover a very large percentage of the Mastodon instances.

Do they often change? Would be great if you can, thank you!

I will make sure the list will be updated on each Github Action run.
Are there things I need to take into consideration when I add the logic for building the server list?

[sandervankasteel]

Hi @ameshkov and @IldarKamalov, I finished updating the PR by adding the dynamic server list code. ☺️

As a small rundown, I also took the opportunity to update the Node version in the pipeline to the latest LTS version (version 18.x).
The primary reason behind the upgrade is to have support for fetch() without resorting to external dependencies like request.

If you have any questions or comments, don't hesitate to reach out.

[ameshkov]

We need additional checks for mastodonRules:

1. Not less than N elements (how many is okay)?
2. Not more than X elements (how many is a good upper limit? 100?)

[sandervankasteel]

100 seems like a fair limit.

Just as an additional check, you want to sort them by total user count ? So that only the top 100 servers are blocked?

[ameshkov]

Since Mastodon logic is not related to hostlists and for better clarity I'd prefer to have it all in a separate file (mastodon.js) imported into index.js

[ameshkov]

Thank you for the contribution! I've got a couple of nitpicks here and there, please take a look.

[sandervankasteel]

Thank you for the contribution! I've got a couple of nitpicks here and there, please take a look.

Perfect! Thanks for the nitpicks, I will pick them up and ping you once they are ready for another round of reviews :)

[sandervankasteel]

@ameshkov it's ready for another round of reviews 😄. I took the liberty of sorting the server list by the total_users count from high to low.