I just saw, that fedidb now has data for the biggest fediverse accounts, so I did a little plotting with it. Here is a graphic of the scattering of the 100 biggest accounts by the instance they are on. 38 of them are on mastodon.social https://fedidb.org/popular-fediverse-accounts (the data is in the alt text) #mastodon #chart #fedidb #fediverse
Made a little script and raked almost 1800 servers and over 40.000 communities.
If someone has the http api call for messages and posts I’d love continuing and maybe set up some sort of search engine… Or maybe I should go with the soap(?) one but I don’t know how to do it in python, any information greatly appreciated!
oh, Good luck with that. Make sure however to respect the users privacy and indexing preferences. People in the Fediverse are very privacy consious and not everyone likes their post scraped and indexed.
I’d start with the Mastodon docs, it’s a solid resource to get started.
Hmm… I’d only index public data (I’m not totally there yet of course), which can be found by anyone, but if there is some way for people, posts, communities, servers, to opt out then ok. Serious question: is there though? Second question, I’m wanting to do this open source, which means anybody can take it, remove the check and scan everything. What are your thoughts about that?
If you know how to query servers, communities, posts or comments on that topic I’m all ears, I’m only doing 50% of that today BTW.
On a side note, where is your 0xCAFE come from? Is it like the stack overflow/ memory error checks like 0xDEAD(or 0xDEADBEEF) and so?
Cheers!
Hey, how’s it going? Are you still working on it?
Sorry for this huge delay, sometimes RL takes over… I don’t know how relevant it still is. I’ll try anyway.
I think this could pose an issue. Many people in the Fediverse are very sensitive about informed consent — which cannot be satisfied by any opt-out mechanism. This is an issue for every bridge/search service, because with opt-in you will have way less users. I strongly recommend to go for opt-in however, you will be starkly criticized otherwise.
Yes, anybody could do that, or build something from scratch, but will meet strong opposition in the Fediserve, as we’ve seen more than once.
Can’t help here, sorry.
Nope, just a nerd who likes computery stuff like hex numbers and, obviously, coffee. No technical magic number I know of (maybe there still is…?).
Hello cafe !
The project is on ice atm, if I get the hang on the API calls for communities and messages I’d probably continue.
I know some people think you shouldn’t scan messages, but they’re free to see out there in the open already? I mean a search engine could actually do wonders for unknown communities, and I’d gladly filter out by some tag or whatever if needed. I mean if I get down to do it :-)
Cheers!