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1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Aug-2018 08:57:09 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

   How would I graph my connections on Mastodon? I want to see if I'm part of a cluster. I get the feeling that I'm part of a cluster of people who all follow each other.

   1. Frankie Saxx (frankiesaxx@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Sunday, 26-Aug-2018 09:02:08 EDT Frankie Saxx

      in reply to

      @thorthenorseman
      There was guy who was graphing that for instances, I forgot the user name but I know I boosted it

      1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Aug-2018 09:08:59 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

         in reply to

         @frankiesaxx Time to code up a social graph bot?

         1. Frankie Saxx (frankiesaxx@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Sunday, 26-Aug-2018 09:21:30 EDT Frankie Saxx

            in reply to

            @thorthenorseman
            hehe oh dear that would be some drama; it would be pretty cool though

            1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Aug-2018 09:28:31 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

               in reply to

               @frankiesaxx If that causes drama, people haven't understood how much information is possible to extract from Mastodon. In terms of access to social graphs, it's not really better than Facebook.

               1. Frankie Saxx (frankiesaxx@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Sunday, 26-Aug-2018 09:46:00 EDT Frankie Saxx

                  in reply to

                  @thorthenorseman
                  Oh it will definitely cause drama if it geta noticed for exactly that reason. Remember the outrage over Tootdon doing search indexing?

         2. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Aug-2018 09:22:07 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

            in reply to

            @frankiesaxx Oh, I know who you're talking about with the instances. I saw those. I think it would be more interesting if people could poke a bot and get back a graph of who's following who. If you used an algorithm that pulls followers close and mutual followers even closer, while people who don't follow each other are repelled, you'd get a nice graph, I think.

            1. Frankie Saxx (frankiesaxx@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Sunday, 26-Aug-2018 12:07:17 EDT Frankie Saxx

               in reply to

               @thorthenorseman
               Personally I think this would be really interesting. Also it would give people the ability to see how closed/open their communities are.

               1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Aug-2018 14:00:20 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

                  in reply to

                  It looks like instances only talk about mutually visible accounts to each other. For example, I can only see 14(!) of your 1.7K followers from my instance, even if I request that data via the API. The full data is only available via the public user page, 12 users at a time. To fetch all your followers, I'd have to execute 142 HTTP requests against your instance, slowly, to avoid flooding or throttling.

                  1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Aug-2018 14:10:55 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

                     in reply to

                     I suppose I could keep a crawl queue for each instance, and crawl multiple instances at once, but supposing I gathered all that data, the natural next step would be to create a search engine that covers the entire Fediverse. That sounds an awful lot like Google to me, and I suspect that it would be highly controversial, since it would essentially bypass Mastodon's limited federation and immediately allow users to view the Fediverse in a way that Gargron is deliberately trying to avoid.

                     1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Aug-2018 14:16:43 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

                        in reply to

                        Come to think of it, the graph I described earlier would easily permit you to run the PageRank algorithm on it in order to score accounts by popularity, since follows are essentially like links from one webpage to another. Again the sort of thing that has the potential to provoke the hell out of the Fediverse.