What FediDB does
FediDB crawls the federated social web and keeps a running count of it: which servers exist, what software they run, how many accounts and posts they hold, and how active they are month to month. The result is a directory of servers, software projects, apps and popular accounts, with history behind every number.
Everything on the site is also available through a public API, so admins, researchers and app developers can build on the same data without scraping it themselves.
How the data is gathered
A crawler visits every known server once every 24 hours and reads its public NodeInfo document, the same endpoint the software exposes to any client. For a small set of popular accounts it also reads the public ActivityPub actor object. It never reads posts, private content, or anything behind a login, and it honors robots.txt. Operators can opt out at any time. Read the full data sources policy.
Principles
Transparent
The methodology is documented, the site's source code is public, and the numbers can be checked against the API.
Decentralized
FediDB exists to support federated, user controlled networks, and it stays independent of any single platform.
Useful
The point is to turn a sprawling network into something people can actually read: a rank, a trend, a comparison.
Open source
The site is open source and welcomes contributions from developers, researchers and anyone curious about the federated web. Bugs, ideas and pull requests all go through GitHub.
Contact
Questions, corrections or data requests: email [email protected] or message @[email protected].