Fediscover - ActivityPub User Profile Discovery Tool

Canonical project page

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.

This program is free software, released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Apache License, Version 2.0

Installation

You will need the following packages:

Python 3.7 or later

python-requests

xdg-utils — (Optional) For opening profile URLs in your web browser

xclip — (Optional) For copying profile URLs to the clipboard

Download the executable

SHA1 sum: 8252dab8215c8a85c4c335ae049780580907b3c2

Place the executable somewhere in your $PATH and give it execution permissions. That's it.

Session and cache files generated by the program will be saved into $HOME/.cache/fediscover.

Development is done via git. You can clone this repository by executing the following command:

> git clone https://simonvolpert.com/bean-add/

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 Trunk¹, 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

¹ Trunk

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Last modified: 2023-01-11

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