For example, can I find ActivityPub instances that kbin.social is federating with? I know that kbin.social is federating with fedia.io, lemmy.world, and mastodon.social. Then I want to find other interesting instances. I am also interested in ActivityPub instances that a certain instance is blocking because they may be rather good for me.
There are web sites that are publishing ActivityPub instances, for example:
https://the-federation.info/platform/184
And maybe there are other sites that are publishing federation relationships of instances. However I want to know how to find federated/blocked instances from a certain instance instead of the sites if I can. Doesn’t ActivityPub have such a method itself?
Update: Lemmy instances have their linked/blocked instances list.
https://lemmy.world/instances
https://lemmy.ml/instances
https://feddit.cl/instances
I want /kbin to have the same list!
Update 2: Mastodon has instance API.
$ curl https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/peers
@uhvayga They definitely federate with the kbin instances which you can find here. https://fedidb.org/software/kbin
Thanks for your info of fedidb! Are all instances listed in fedidb federated each other? I want to be sure about it somehow…
However I want to know how to find federated instances from a certain instance instead of the sites if I can. Doesn’t ActivityPub have such a method itself?
It probably has a way, since kbin has a federation button at the top right in the sidebar. kbin.social’s bar has the “instances” list empty there. I have no kbin account so I cannot tell if it’s private and the list would be nonempty when someone logged in kbin.social views it. Haven’t seen a dedicated “page” to do that, as Lemmy does in the https://{lemmyinstance}/instances url. You can view all the magazines on the instances you are federating, as they appear in https://kbin.social/magazines -all the magazines with an @instance suffix are magazines that are currently federating-.
In my opinion, currently federating instances list may not be very useful for discovery and exploration as they tend to get very large and for exploring their magazines properly, they are already in the magazines list of your instance. Any instance not already federating with your instance may start federating -unless blocked- when you subscribe to some magazines, so for community/magazines exploration and discovery, probably a list like The Lemmy Explorer -which includes kbin instances now too- may be of more use. I understand this is not what you want but it is how federation works with apps following the ActivityPub protocol. At least the most popular ones i know.
Blocked/defederated instances lists are more likely to be useful in this sense because they usually are not very large, and they tell you what you have no chance of communicating from your instance.
It probably has a way, since kbin has a federation button at the top right in the sidebar. kbin.social’s bar has the “instances” list empty there.
I didn’t notice it until seeing your post. Thanks!
I have no kbin account so I cannot tell if it’s private and the list would be nonempty when someone logged in kbin.social views it.
The list is also empty with my account logging in kbin.social.
[…] they are already in the magazines list of your instance.
They are as you said. Now I’ve come to think that scraping the magazines list is the most realistic way to find federated instances from a certain instance except blocked ones.
I want admins to publish their configs to federate/block other instances though they have no duty to do. :D
The list is also empty with my account logging in kbin.social.
Makes perfect sense, tbh. The list of instances federating with yours will get too large pretty quickly to have it listed in the sidebar -see the one of my instance, literally hundreds-. A sidebar is a terrible place for that information.
I want admins to publish their configs to federate/block other instances though they have no duty to do. :D
Maybe you can ask for the feature in the project site and future versions of Kbin will have it and no need for admins to include it themselves. I believe the developers had the intention to show the instances connected -as seen by the sidebar thing-, so maybe it’s just asking for a page similar to Lemmy’s one. Though it is possible that kbin.social admins do not want to show it and are actually hiding it.
