dafr/README.md

# doing frequent applied fediverse research

* hands-on approach to verify statistics on fediverse from fediverse.network and the-federation.info
* draws conclusions from that

## methodology 

### Mapping the network
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. This from the assumption that getting peer lists from Mastodon & Pleroma gives enough of a view of 'known fediverse' to work with.

  > initial peer list
  >> all peers of the initial peers
  >>> all peers of the peers of the inintial peers
  
  ------------------------------------------------- +
  the known fediverse?

### Instance metadata
We try to query `/.well-known/nodeinfo` for instance meta-data such as software type etc. This is what both fediverse.network and the-federation.info do

When any request fails on a given instance it logs the raised `Exception`, if it is a HTTP error instead we currently log the answer.

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~~