[seanlane]

It's not entirely clear to me after reading, but the author addresses it somewhat in the article. Seems like it depends on the persistence of the crawler, if the host instance permits that info to be shared:

> In the example above, if Ringo were to reshare John's reshare of my status - John doesn't know about it. Only the original poster (me) gets notified. If John doesn't share his social graph, it might be possible to work out where Ringo saw the status - but that's rather unlikely.

> Mastodon has an API rate limit which only allows 80 results per request and 1 request per second. That makes it long and tedious to crawl thousands of results.

> Similarly, some instances do not share their social data or expose anything of significance. Some servers may no longer exist, or might have changed names. It's impossible to get a comprehensive view of the entire Fediverse network.