Hi everyone, I have some technical questions regarding federation. Answers backed by documentation would be perfect.

  1. Is there a way to get the list of federated instances of a specific instance?
  2. (Regarding question 1, should this consider active followers between instances? If not actively defederated/blocked, when one account follows another from another instance, the two instances get federated, right?)
  3. Can I get a list of actively blocked/defederated/muted instances?
  4. How does this change between applications? Are for example Lemmy and Mastodon the same?

My goal is to possibly create a graph/network analysis.

Thank you for your help.

  • kersploosh@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    When viewing an instance’s main page in a web browser, scroll all the way to the bottom and click on “Instances”. That will show all instances federated with, or blocked by, the given instance.

    I’m not sure I can answer your other questions, though you might be interested in https://fba.ryona.agency. It will let you enter an instance and see who is blocking it. For example, here are the instances blocking my home instance, sh.itjust.works: https://fba.ryona.agency/?domain=sh.itjust.works

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    You can see the list of federated instances of each instance at https://example.com/instances

    You can also get that data in json format by using https://example.com/api/v3/federated_instances

    https://lemmy.readme.io/reference/getfederatedinstances

    Mastodon and Lemmy are both using the ActivityPub protocol (Lemmy uses some extensions to federate downvotes and some other actions) to communicate between instances, but the API to interrogate a Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed or kbin instance will be different.

    • semperpeppe@feddit.itOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      This is exactly what I am looking for. I am interested also in how other federated applications do it. I had a look at Pixelfed’s documentation, but they don’t seem to have an API for that… Do you know anything about other services?

  • SamXavia@kbin.run
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago
    1. https://fedidb.org/ This is a great site to find different Instances
    2. A person who runs the instance blocks ones that may be deemed as unsafe, you can further block users and sometimes instances depending on the instance (But this will only block it for your view)
    3. If the Instance displays it publicly than yes overwise no
    4. Mastodon is more towards what Twitter is like, as Lemmy is more towards Reddit, Crossover for them can be done on things like Kbin/Mbin but they are confusing to begin with. If you have a certain Social Media you like we can most likely find a Fediverse version