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.
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
This looks very cool, thank you!
As an implementor, one of the additional things I'm curious about are the commonalities (or lack thereof) among the structure of various URIs. Would you be open to, for example, analyzing common prefixes in a single activity, to notice for example that the actor ID is or is not present as a portion of (say) the followers collection?
Darius Kazemi
Jeremy Bornstein