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fediscover
A user profile discovery tool for ActivityPub social servers
In July 2019, the number of registered users across the fediverse has reached three million. At the same time, each new user faces a discovery problem. On one hand, he must somehow find users to follow. On the other, he must be somehow found himself.
Even though most servers provide a local user directory to explore and a live feed to look at, and even though several global user directory services exist, the new user is very unlikely to be able to keep track of the profiles he had already seen; Instead, he is likely to end up opening the same profile more than once, wondering why it looks so familiar. Enter fediscover
, a profile discovery tool that seeks to automate this process.
Requirements
You will need the following packages:
- Python 3.7 or later
python-requests
xdg-utils
— (Optional) For opening profile URLs in your web browserxclip
— (Optional) For copying profile URLs to the clipboard
Session and cache files generated by the program will be saved into $HOME/.cache/fediscover
.
Basic Usage
Seed the program by passing it a URL to work with, like so:
fediscover crawl URL
The URL can be anything you can get your hands on: an instance's profile directory, the profile URL or username of a "connected" user (someone who follows and is followed by at least a few other users), an opt-in user directory, such as one of the lists in Trunk, or any other web page that links to any user on any ActivityPub server. The program will crawl the URL and collect any profile URLs it can find. At this point, you can ask for a profile URL, like so:
fediscover next
Look at the profile at the end of the URL to decide if he's worth following. Repeat as necessary. You can be fairly confident that you will always have a new profile to look at, and never need to look at the same profile again.
You can speed things up by copying the profile URL to the clipboard with fediscover next --copy
or open it in your browser directly with fediscover next --open
.
You can blacklist some URL fragments from being crawled and displayed to you with fediscover blacklist WORD
.
For a complete list of recognized command line options, run fediscover --help
.
Other Notes
This program is free software, released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the LICENSE file for more information.
The program's canonical project page resides at https://simonvolpert.com/fediscover/
I gratefully accept appreciation for my work in material form at bitcoincash:qrmc2w3emlhy36tuuy4p7wj6gvdtg3usnu0c4zyfwp.
Commit History
@master
git clone https://simonvolpert.com/fediscover/
- Update minimum required Python version in README Simon Volpert 1 year, 8 months ago
- Update README Simon Volpert 4 years ago
- Convert a username into a profile URL before crawling Simon Volpert 4 years ago
- Force crawling the next URL when a profile URL is passed on the command line Simon Volpert 5 years ago
- Remove obsolete comment Simon Volpert 5 years ago
- Unify reporting of blacklisted URLs Simon Volpert 5 years ago
- Remove "skip" option Simon Volpert 5 years ago
- Keep crawling on transient connection failure, retry failed URLs once Simon Volpert 5 years ago
- Update README Simon Volpert 5 years ago
- Keep crawling until there are users in the queue or the URL queue runs out Simon Volpert 5 years ago