Darius KazemiSep 14, 2024

Excited to announce that I will be at #fediforum today speed demo-ing my latest project: an ActivityPub data observatory!

This observatory does not collect any user data or metadata. Instead I am looking at the *shape* (aka schema) of data being sent around the fediverse. This will let software devs ask questions like "How is a Mastodon 4.2.0 image post formatted differently from a Misskey 2024.7.0 image post?"

And we'll get real answers based on data rather than on poor documentation.

Show threadEvan ProdromouSep 14, 2024
@darius can you compare to browser.pub?
Show threadDarius KazemiSep 14, 2024
@evan yeah. on browserpub I can say "hey help me take a look at these particular messages I know about". This observatory will surface information about stuff floating around the fedi that I don't even know about. For example I am already learning about server software I've never even heard of, and I would not have put that into browser.pub because I wouldn't have known it existed
Show threadEvan Prodromou
@darius Ah, OK, interesting. Where does your network tap plug in?
Sep 14, 2024 at 3:29pmWeb
Show threadDarius KazemiSep 14, 2024
@evan still figuring it out. Right now I am subscribing to a public relay as that is the most software-neutral source I could think of, but I am looking at other ingestion methods too. Importantly I want to ingest AP only... I'm not going to hit proprietary API endpoints like most scrapers do
Show threadEvan ProdromouSep 14, 2024
@darius barf, no