My attempt at 'relaying' traffic from a relay-less mastodon instance. fedifeeder scrapes the public timeline of an instance and follow users that show up there, with the intention of creating a more 'organic' federated timeline on a personal Activitypub server instance which doesn't currently support relays (in my case GoToSocial).
The concept around this can be found here: hachyderm/community#32
To use fedifeeder, both the source and target servers must allow API access.
Currently fedifeeder only accepts parameters via environment variables. See: env.sh.example for an example of what to set.
a simple status is available at: http://localhost:8080/healthz
Setting the DEBUG env var to any value will make the http://localhost:8080/debug endpoint available for information on the current uses and IDs fedifeeder knows about.
I chose to be up-front about what I was doing and set up a fedifeeder account on my local instance with description of the process with a link back to this repository. I then ran fedifeeder for about 30 minutes to populate that user's friends list with anyone who posted to the public feed of an instance I liked the "consistency" of. This allowed me to get federated data, while still not pushing a bunch of random people to my personal account on the instance. After that, my federated timeline started populating with posts from the users who posted over that time and normal federated data started showing up.
It's worth noting there were some people who were concerned about the privacy implications of this. There weren't many, and I feel like following normal protocols made this process relatively OK despite a minor amount of blow-back (I also found out this was in fact semi-common prior to the creation of relays, and even had the name 'follow bot'). I would, however, recommend that if you take this approach you should add a VERY explicit description for the bot user, explaining everything about it you can as well as exactly who you are and why you're doing this, as well as monitor the feed users notifications for a while to reply to people who voice questions and concerns.
Please note:
- a friend request was made through the regular channels, which could be, and sometimes was, rejected
- the #nobot tag is honored
- figure out if I actually need a TOKEN to read the public timeline using go-mastodon
- support a config file
- Move to using streams