You can now search for #Hashtags with #mastoview and choosing if you want to get only results from one instance or its federated results.
Here is #Mastoviz. A little website that visualizes your Mastodon Network.
1. Enter your instance
2. Authorize the automatically created app
3. Load your network
4. Explore it
#mastodon #glitch #dataviz #network #sigmajs #visualization #opensource
Fediverse as of 2018-08-24.
7 788 instances with 1 303 382 connections.
Let's look at the different clusters. They aren't clearly separated, but still visible.
The best account search tool for the #Fediverse I have seen yet.
My first explorations of the Fediverse started in 2017 and again in 2018 with a data-centric account, but like many others, I lost interest and my accounts were dormant for years. With the announcement that Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter many people started to post in the Fediverse (again). I updated some of my things like MastoVue, a tool to look at the local timelines of Mastodon instances and search for hashtags, and the visualization of Fediverse instances.
As another experiment, I made this blog subscribeable in the Fedivery by adding the ActivityPub protocol. If you search for @luca@lucahammer.com with your Fediverse account, you can subscribe to it and get the full posts directly in your Fediverse client. (To be honest, I am not sure if it works as intended because old posts aren’t fetched, so I need to write this post to test it.)
The whole process was super easy thanks to the wonderful activitypub-plugin by Pfefferle. Just search for it in your WordPress backend, install it, activate it and you are done. After activating the plugin, you can search for @username@domain.tld and subscribe. In the plugin settings, I changed the shortlink at the end of the entry to a full link, but that’s not necessary.
This blog showed the error “503 remote SSL certificate could not be verified” the first time I tried to search for it and later no error message but still didn’t show it. The issue was my SEO plugin YOAST, where the author archives were deactivated. After changing that setting, it worked.
For debugging I used the webfinger discovery tool, which showed me the link to the author profile. When I visited it, I was redirected to the homepage and knew that something was wrong. That the SEO plugin was the issue was a guess, but I don’t use many plugins. The next step would have been to deactivate plugins one by one.
Search for @luca@lucahammer.com with your fediverse account and let me know if it works.
https://lucahammer.com/2022/05/08/joining-the-fediverse-with-wordpress
I fixed https://mastovue.glitch.me which allows you to peek into the local timeline of other instances. (if the instances allows it)
With the new wave of users and @Luca working again on a #Fediverse visualization, this reminded me that I wanted to discuss a brief exploration of the #network I did some months ago.
In 2018, some researchers took a screenshot of Mastodon instances, I wanted to check how these evolved after 4 years.
I also tried to get a more global picture of the network to see how the different platforms interact.
So I'll talk about how many instances died (and other stuff) in a short thread. ⬇️
That's it for today. Next time, I want to integrate this wonderful script by @tfardet and add more information about each instance and remove or mark the dead ones.
https://vis.social/web/@tfardet@fediscience.org/108211618847424673
Let me know, if you are interested in something specific.
If you want to look for an instance yourself, here is a searchable SVG. It's 12 MB and may crash your browser. And you have to use the browser search or scroll a lot to find anything. https://lucahammer.com/projects/fediverse/2022-04-29-fediverse.svg
I removed those nodes (which are all dead anyways).
Let's look at the different areas of the big hairball at the bottom.
Left side in blue, seems to be dominated by friendica instances.
Below them in black are the biggest Mastodon instances like mastodon.social and chaos.social.
Bottom right in orange sound Japanese.
Not sure what the top ones in green have in common. They got many incoming peers as well, but no common theme.
What's that pink cluster at the top? 31 998 gab[.]best instances. Or just domains? I assume they tried that to circumvent instance level blocks.
The only instance they are connected to? beehub.
(I wasn't involved with the Fediverse for some years. Feel free to explain what's going on.)
New day, new try.
#Fediverse as of 2022-04-29.
I found 61 266 instances and 6 217 452 connections (peers). This includes non-functional ones because my script can't differentiate them yet.
1 455 returned info about the instance, 2 547 returned peers. That's an indication for the number of active instances which support the v1 API.
Just discovered the great project https://www.fediverse.space/, which was inspired by one of my older works. It's an interactive network of the #Fediverse and calculates the edges based on mentions between instances. Currently it contains 2445 instances.
/via @anneroth @sozialwelten
So many error codes. I think I should add that info as well to see if certain parts of the fediverse are broken. (In the past the visualization didn't care if an instance existed or not. Only if another instance listed it as a peer.)
Only two of those gave me the number of outgoing connections aka peers. Those two had 15 904 and 14 106.
Hinting at a massive problem with the data.
Overall I only have outgoing connections from 269 instances.
But when I look at the API by hand they don't hide the info. I have to stop the analysis and debug my script before proceeding. Sorry.
The whitelist mode could explain the lower number of connections.
"3.0.0 - requires user token if instance is in whitelist mode"
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/instance/
Sidenote: activity endpoint sounds like a great addition.
First issue: I only got additional info (domain count, status_count, user_count, version) about 273 instances. Not sure if most instances don't share that info or if the API changed and I have to update the script. Will look into it later (maybe).
In 2018, I tried to map the Fediverse for the first time: https://vis.social/@Luca/100606625507856187
Back then, I found 7788 instances that had over a million connections to each other.
Today, I want to create a new visualization. I am using the same script (https://gist.github.com/lucahammer/eb68fc43a34877a304e7b81e5f729c4b) and so far it seems work.
if #datavis folks are considering the fediverse, the Mastodon instance http://vis.social is a nice place to start — it’s run by @kristinhenry@twitter.com a.k.a. https://vis.social/@kristinhenry
ezgif-4-1e7e300fce.gif, 9/23/18, created with https://editor.p5js.org/ & ezgif.
#creativecoding #algorithmicart #generative #generativeart #stochastic #randomness #mastoart #javascript #processing #p5
I think #Path was my all time favorite app once. Didn’t use it for years now due to personal reasons and since it changed over the years. Now it’s shutting down and it makes me sad. No other app ever managed to deliver the feeling of “home” for me, Path once did. Goodbye and thanks for all the memories 👋😢 https://path.com/about // at least it was not sold to fb