If you’re on a smaller Mastodon instance, one of the challenges you will run into is that, unless you follow a ton of people across various instances, you’re only going to see a small portion of the fediverse.
This is a technical limitation of how Mastodon and the fediverse works. But it’s also an opportunity to innovate and to be part of an effort to grow the open web.
One idea I’m playing with is the Fediverse Explorer.
Fediverse Explorer: Browse most recent public posts across the fediverse*.
https://fediverse-explorer.stefanbohacek.dev/
This is a very early prototype, but I'd love to start getting feedback early. Are there any similar tools out there? A better way to approach this?
*Only Mastodon instances are supported at this time.
Made a few small updates to https://fediverse-explorer.stefanbohacek.dev:
– automatic dark mode
– moved settings to a "More options" section
– neat loading animationNow I'm looking into adding an option to log in with your fediverse account to import muted/blocked accounts and instances.
Not seeing a ton of options though, unsurprisingly everyone wants to make tools for Mastodon.
Any pointers would be very appreciated!
At this stage, the name of this tool is more about its ambitions, as I’m already running into a few challenges trying to expand it beyond just Mastodon.
Fediverse Explorer works by fetching the public RSS feeds of multiple Mastodon instances, a feature not available on some of the other fediverse networks that I’ve looked at.
https://mastodon.social/tags/introduction.rssInterestingly, the RSS feed will include posts from instances known to the instance you’re looking at, and that includes non-Mastodon servers as well. So this nearly solves one of the problems. Another one I run into is signing into the app with any fediverse account. I am still looking into that, so I’ll leave this for a future blog post.
In the meantime, give Fediverse Explorer a try, see feature highlights and the source code on GitHub, and let me know what you think!
FAQ
How do I remove my post from Fediverse Explorer?
You can’t, because my site doesn’t really store any data, it only shows the content of Mastodon’s public RSS feed. If you’d like to have your posts excluded from the public RSS feed, please leave a comment on Mastodon’s GitHub page or contact the Mastodon team directly.
