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 threadDarius KazemiSep 14, 2024

I won't be actually LAUNCHING this tool until I've found out how you all would feel about it being opt-out vs opt-in. I will provide a longer blog post for you all to read with details, but in short:

It would be really helpful for general interop on the fedi if this were opt-out. But if people are generally freaked out by having technical details about software data formats being opt-out... I'll make it opt-in.

Quick explanation of the data scrubbing in the attached images

Show threadEmelia 👸🏻Sep 14, 2024
@darius given it's just collecting the unique shapes of data, I think it's perfectly fine to be opt-out, since there's no user data at all. (assuming you never store the raw data anywhere)
Show threadDarius Kazemi
@thisismissem correct, I just scrub the data and throw it away
Sep 14, 2024 at 4:06pmWeb
Show threadEmelia 👸🏻Sep 14, 2024
@darius yeah, I think having a clear privacy policy that shows clearly that you're not storing any personal information and working only through relays should be fine to be opt-out