Gregory's ServerI'm getting back to my project of trying to make social graphs from an account on the Fediverse. Gosh, with a depth of level 3 (followers of followers of my followers) you don't realise how many accounts you're linked to! The script hasn't finished running and there are already more than 210,000 accounts in my case.
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I tried with a small account, on a small server, these subscribers and subscriptions are hidden. All I had to do was scan all the accounts on this server to find 63% of its subscriptions. Look at this, scraping followers and following with a depth level of 2 of one notorious Fediverse user, I can get who I am following and who is following me, even if that is hidden from my profile. With a little bit of time, with this, I can basically get followers and following of any Fediverse private account. For this not to work, the two accounts having a relationship must respond to one or both of these conditions at the same time: the account must be private, the followers and following hidden. I don't know what the heck I'm doing, but this is fucking cool XD I'll have to create a test account, because working with so many nodes (919,690) it's going to make my computer crash. |
This made me realise something, on Mastodon we can hide our subscribers and subscriptions, but if the people we subscribe to and who subscribe to us don't do the same, it's useless... I mean, yes it makes it harder to get that information, but it doesn't make it impossible to get.