dafr/README.md

# 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](https://fediverse.network/info) 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