Mastodon: Expose instance metadata as json-ld

[pierreozoux]

In the context of https://github.com/TheKinrar/mastodon-instances and https://github.com/libresh/catalog it would be a great feature to be able to scrape information in an automated manner.

As an admin, I already fill these metadata (description, name...) in the admin interface.

Exposing them as json-ld would ease the automation around listing instances and hosters that offer mastodon.

[Gargron]

There is no standard for "instance data" in ActivityPub, but we already have a REST API that does this: /api/v1/instance - mastodon-instances uses that + some extra info they have admins fill-in manually.

[Gargron]

To be precise there is an emerging protocol for this kinda thing, but it's not JSON-LD afaik: https://github.com/jaywink/nodeinfo2

[pierreozoux]

@Gargron is it a typo? Did you want to point to https://github.com/jhass/nodeinfo instead?

[pierreozoux]

Created this issue also to know about json-ld: https://github.com/jhass/nodeinfo/issues/19

[wiktor-k]

It would be good to have nodeinfo, nodeinfo2 or something else standarized as being listed at https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/peers (or some other popular instance) automatically subscribes the domain to a bunch of crawlers trying several different URLs, some of them every 5 minutes!

[rhaamo]

https://github.com/jhass/nodeinfo would be the one to use, Pleroma is implementing it, and other servers like Funkwhale too.

[Gargron]

{
  "version": "2.0",
  "software": {
    "name": "diaspora",
    "version": "0.5.0"
  },
  "protocols": ["diaspora"],
  "services": {
    "inbound": ["gnusocial"],
    "outbound": ["facebook", "twitter"]
  },
  "openRegistrations": true,
  "usage": {
    "users": {
      "total": 123,
      "activeHalfyear": 42,
      "activeMonth": 23
    },
    "localPosts": 500,
    "localComments": 1000
  },
  "metadata": {
    "chat_enabled": true
  }
}

From the example.json of 2.0 schema. Mind most properties are camelCase, but chat_enabled is snake_case, and activeHalfyear is neither (halfyear is not a word), plus the fact that those timeframes are super arbitrary.

It seems to still be in an early stage and I'm not in a hurry to adopt it (it also doesn't have an official body like a W3C working group behind it)

[rhaamo]

activeHalfyear etc. are not mandatory at all. users->total is the minimum, localPosts may be, the other one no.

and about "chat_enabled" it's the metadata field, which is free-form, you can use "chatEnabled" if you want.

[Sylvhem]

(it also doesn't have an official body like a W3C working group behind it)

To be fair, we just adopted RSS, which is a non-standard and deprecated technology, even as Atom have been standardized by an official body, the IETF, more than ten years ago. So I'm not really sure it's a concern here.

[wiktor-k]

It seems there are two problems (well, three if you count RSS ;) ): one is the location of statistics endpoints (currently hardcoded in crawlers as /api/v1/instance... etc.) and the statistics format. The latter will take some time to stabilize as there are multiple parties involved.

But the location of statistics endpoints - what various nodeinfo specs define as /.well-known/nodeinfo or x-nodeinfo-2 etc. could be stored in a place that is already defined: /.well-known/host-meta.

So Mastodon could add host-meta link with rel (e.g.) https://joinmastodon/ns#instance-info, pointing to /api/v1/instance, nodeinfo could use their own rel http://nodeinfo.diaspora.software/ns/schema/2.0 and crawlers could use one endpoint, that is standarized right now to quickly see what stats are available.

[Lynnesbian]

Any update on this? I'm writing a program that aims to work with as many different fediverse instances as possible, and I'd really like it if there was a standard supported by all of them. nodeinfo is used by Pleroma, Misskey, Friendica, Osada, Hubzilla, GangGo, Diaspora*, and probably others. The only instance types I've been able to find that don't work with it are GNU Social (which was last updated in late 2014) and Mastodon.

[ghost]

Even GNU Social can serve nodeinfo via a plugin; see, for example, https://gnusocial.cc/.

[jaywink]

Noo, was hoping to get Mastodon behind ServiceInfo, but was moving too slowly :(