p on Nostr: ​ npub1pv24l…a4kk8 Since fedilist has been running for a little over three years, ...

​ (npub1ajw…aj8d) npub1pv24lsy7l5sjht3e4hg7w79lp4dgj3cxtfw3rvp6uwl46lfjywkqna4kk8 (npub1pv2…4kk8) Since fedilist has been running for a little over three years, if I was planning something evil, surely I would have gotten around to it by now.

Since I can't see OP, just the subject line that has ended up in other people's posts (maybe woem.men blocks SPC), I guess I'll address it here with the hope that it somehow gets to that admin.

> fedi meta, scraper advisory for admins

It's not a scraper; it doesn't try to get any content, it uses only well-known API endpoints, and it only fetches the stuff that every Misskey instance fetches, for example. It clearly identifies itself in the user-agent and doesn't try to get around it if people reject requests from that UA. It even respects the `discoverable` flag on the admins' profiles. (And it has help text for same: http://demo.fedilist.com/p/discoverable .) There are actual scrapers around, and they are way less friendly and are way less open about what they are doing and why. (Hi, npub1sqr0yfj6d8tyxxesvq3dghmzwqd0dgzs4s9jrklnd5gg8hlg0t2sclqs4m (npub1sqr…qs4m) !) When fediverse.network went down, I wanted something like it, and no one made something like it, so I did. It's never been the highest-priority project, like I mostly add stuff to it when someone asks or when I have a question about something going on in the network.

The point of the project is that it is hopefully useful to admins and people curious about the network, as well as most of fedi. It saves me having to look up who admins are, whether something weird is going on with an instance, it shows the instance description without requiring a bunch of JavaScript, it lists the source code repositories for the instances that report them ( http://demo.fedilist.com/source-code ), it lists the instances where something unusual is going on ( http://demo.fedilist.com/hockeystick ), there are CSVs and RSS feeds for almost every page, you can see the newest instances ( http://demo.fedilist.com/instance/newest ), the front page has fedi-wide statistics, you can point an RSS reader at an instance's status changes page and see when it goes up or down; I use it to monitor instances I use ( http://demo.fedilist.com/instance/recent-changes?host=shitposter.club ) or run ( http://demo.fedilist.com/instance/recent-changes?host=freespeechextremist.com ) so that I can see if there's downtime or if it's my net connection. You can search for instances by name, description, whether they are on Tor or the clearnet, whether registrations are open or closed or invite-only or approval-only.

That has been useful. There are a lot of pieces of software and it can be difficult to figure out what's going on with an instance. If there's a lot of spam coming from it, but you can see that eight hours ago it just had three users and it has open registrations, then probably the admin is asleep and not malicious. We also used it to figure out where the activitypub-troll.cf peers got into the network (sorting the list of instances by peer count, it became obvious when some of them had 100k peers), and that is how we found out that it got Misskey worse than Mastodon, even, and we were able to ping the affected admins (at least the ones that didn't block us). The hockeystick page linked above was created as a response to that, so instances that are acting unusual (relative to their own previous behavior) are highlighted.

There's already fediverse.observer and it's more useful for people that are just joining, so they can find an instance, but the data that's useful to people that are already here is a little different, fediverse.space always looked cool.

The data is all there so that it's open and accessible to anyone using fedi, with the hope that it's useful to people. There's nothing devious going on, it's exactly what it says it is.