flamingos-cant

An interactive tragedy.

  • 4 Posts
  • 40 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • i apparently cannot figure out ascii shrugs, nvm

    ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ => ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    Just so we’re clear, what this crawler does is go through all servers that use ActivityPub known to it, and congregate that data to a list of known services (Lemmy, Mastodon, Piefed etc.). How is does that is by querying a standardised end point to get the instance info (.well-known/nodeinfo which will then point to a different path to get the actual info).

    For instance, here’s what it will collect for feddit.uk:

    nodeinfo json
    // curl -s https://feddit.uk/nodeinfo/2.1 | jq
    {
      "version": "2.1",
      "software": {
        "name": "lemmy",
        "version": "0.19.10-feddit",
        "repository": "https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy",
        "homepage": "https://join-lemmy.org/"
      },
      "protocols": [
        "activitypub"
      ],
      "usage": {
        "users": {
          "total": 4184,
          "activeHalfyear": 718,
          "activeMonth": 485
        },
        "localPosts": 25750,
        "localComments": 122835
      },
      "openRegistrations": true,
      "services": {
        "inbound": [],
        "outbound": []
      },
      "metadata": {}
    }
    

    The important stat here is the localPosts, which is all the posts made by local users in any community, local or remote. It does not include posts by users from remote instances made in local communities. You can also see this data on the instance sidebar in lemmy-ui.

    lemmy.zip going down will only reduce aggregated stats for total posts by 47,280, as that’s what they report for their localPosts.





  • But what about the DIDs, the things used to actually identify accounts within the ATproto ecosystem:

    But Bluesky has developed its own DID method, did:plc. Today, did:plc stands for “Public Ledger of Credentials”, however it originally stood for “Placeholder DIDs”, with the hope of replacing them with something else later. The way that did:plc works is that Bluesky hosts a web service from which one can register, retrieve, and rotate keys (and other associated DID document information). However, this ledger is centrally controlled by Bluesky.

    It’s literally not possible to have a functional PDS without registering with a Bluesky server and they maintain indefinite control over the ledger. All your data is tied to this DID, it’s how the entire protocol is designed to identify stuff, how decentralised is your data if it’s dependent on Blusky (the company) assigning you an identity?








  • Seems they’re all running the same version, or Piefed doesn’t tag releases:

    piefed.social nodeinfo
    curl -s https://piefed.social/nodeinfo/2.0 | jq
    {
      "openRegistrations": true,
      "protocols": [
        "activitypub"
      ],
      "software": {
        "name": "PieFed",
        "version": "0.1"
      },
      "usage": {
        "localComments": 12382,
        "localPosts": 1169,
        "users": {
          "activeHalfyear": 561,
          "activeMonth": 309,
          "total": 800
        }
      },
      "version": "2.0"
    }
    
    feddit.online nodeinfo
    curl -s https://feddit.online/nodeinfo/2.0 | jq
    {
      "openRegistrations": true,
      "protocols": [
        "activitypub"
      ],
      "software": {
        "name": "PieFed",
        "version": "0.1"
      },
      "usage": {
        "localComments": 503,
        "localPosts": 214,
        "users": {
          "activeHalfyear": 85,
          "activeMonth": 34,
          "total": 85
        }
      },
      "version": "2.0"
    }