Mastodon is now tracked, and the API tells you how fast a post is growing

Mastodon is one of the few networks open enough to read without a login, a key or an extension: each instance publishes what is trending on it. We read the trends of several instances every hour and keep every post above an engagement floor calibrated on Mastodon's own numbers, not carried over from X, where the counts are two orders of magnitude bigger. A boost on Mastodon hides the real post inside it; we unwrap it, so the posts that are spreading are exactly the ones that get kept.

• A Mastodon page in the sidebar, with filters for instance, minimum engagement and time range, sorted by engagement or date.
• Posts are stored by their home address, not by the id each server gives them, so adding an instance widens coverage instead of multiplying duplicates.
• Available in the public API with source=mastodon.

growth_24h on the API

We have been keeping an hourly snapshot of every post's numbers for months; nothing read it back. The trending endpoint now returns growth_24h for every network: the value 24 hours ago, the value now, the delta and the percent. An agent can say "+340% in a day" instead of quoting an absolute number, which is what makes a radar a radar rather than an archive.