I am running this site (and the crawlers and whatnot) as a public service to make it easier to find servers on fedi. It started life as a pile of impromptu scripts I used to answer questions I (and others) had about the network, and eventually I copied the CofeSpace frontend (which was itself copypasta) to turn it into a site, spent some time optimizing crawler throughput, etc., and now it is sort of real.

It is useful for admins and network explorers and researchers. The original intent was to make it easy to find a server to join, but the codebase kind of grew around things I needed to know or things people asked me, so it’s probably mostly useful for people that are running servers (like the Prometheus stuff, the RSS feeds for status changes, etc.), people hacking on fedi software (like the list of git repos), and other uses for fedi-wide data.

I run fedi servers, and they get hammered on a regular basis, they go up and down. So FediList provides things like the raw nodeinfo, so you can get that even when the server is down, or you can get the data from here.

People ask me if a server is up or down, now they don’t have to: there is a site that checks. You can use the RSS feed or the Prometheus data to monitor your instance. You can see if an instance just had a huge uptick in users and if it has open or closed registrations. You can feed CSVs into R or awk or whatever. It’s like that, you know? Stuff for admins and hackers, it exists to answer questions about the network.

The data has been used to identify problems in the network: for example, when activitypub-troll.cf flooded fedi with fake peers, we identified the affected instances by finding the ones with sudden upticks in peer count. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, FediList managed to record the massive increase in servers that arrived, so people could watch it in almost real-time (by hitting “Refresh” a lot). That is the sort of thing FediList is for.