directorate for applied fediverse research

• independently tries to verify fediverse statistics
• draws conclusions from that

methodology

Currently the script starts from https://post.lurk.org and queries /api/v1/instance/peers to find servers it is peering with. For each of the peering servers it hasn’t seen before it does the same and in addition it tries to query /api/v1/instance for meta data.

This method is a bit lacking because providing /api/v1/instance is voluntary and specific to later versions of mastodon/activitypub fediverse. We should study the methodology of fediverse.network for better results.

When the request fails on a given instance it just logs it as ‘error’ now.

Latest scrape results can be found in instance_scrape.json

TODO FIXME

• add detailed error message to json when we get one
• abstract the functions so we can multithread them
• find a way to also scrape for instances that don’t announce themselves