Hi everyone, I have some technical questions regarding federation. Answers backed by documentation would be perfect.
- Is there a way to get the list of federated instances of a specific instance?
- (Regarding question 1, should this consider active followers between instances? If not actively defederated/blocked, when one account follows another from another instance, the two instances get federated, right?)
- Can I get a list of actively blocked/defederated/muted instances?
- How does this change between applications? Are for example Lemmy and Mastodon the same?
My goal is to possibly create a graph/network analysis.
Thank you for your help.
When viewing an instance’s main page in a web browser, scroll all the way to the bottom and click on “Instances”. That will show all instances federated with, or blocked by, the given instance.
I’m not sure I can answer your other questions, though you might be interested in https://fba.ryona.agency. It will let you enter an instance and see who is blocking it. For example, here are the instances blocking my home instance, sh.itjust.works: https://fba.ryona.agency/?domain=sh.itjust.works
This is very helpful. Unfortunately the source code is not available… How did you find this service? Maybe you can point me to some other resource
Someone linked it in a comment a few months ago, and I happened to bookmark it.
Here are a few other sites that might be interesting:
You can see the list of federated instances of each instance at https://example.com/instances
You can also get that data in json format by using https://example.com/api/v3/federated_instances
https://lemmy.readme.io/reference/getfederatedinstances
Mastodon and Lemmy are both using the ActivityPub protocol (Lemmy uses some extensions to federate downvotes and some other actions) to communicate between instances, but the API to interrogate a Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed or kbin instance will be different.
This is exactly what I am looking for. I am interested also in how other federated applications do it. I had a look at Pixelfed’s documentation, but they don’t seem to have an API for that… Do you know anything about other services?
- https://fedidb.org/ This is a great site to find different Instances
- A person who runs the instance blocks ones that may be deemed as unsafe, you can further block users and sometimes instances depending on the instance (But this will only block it for your view)
- If the Instance displays it publicly than yes overwise no
- Mastodon is more towards what Twitter is like, as Lemmy is more towards Reddit, Crossover for them can be done on things like Kbin/Mbin but they are confusing to begin with. If you have a certain Social Media you like we can most likely find a Fediverse version
This is very helpful. Unfortunately the source code is not available… How did you find this service? Maybe you can point me to some other resource
