A tinted screenshot of the Fediverse Explorer interface showing an input field for a tag, a toggled section with

Fediverse Explorer

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.

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.rss

Interestingly, 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!

A tinted composite of screenshots of the main extension menu showing a customized list of instances, and the settings page.
A screenshot of a simple text input field with stefanbohacek.com used as an example and a button that can be dragged to your browser and used as a bookmarklet.
A tinted screenshot of the data visualization showing two columnns with a map of NYC with a few locations marked in one, and a card with details about one of the pizzerias.

Makeover Monday: Week 5, 2023

Exploring the priciest slices in NYC the Makeover Monday 2023 challenge, week 5.

#data #dataviz #food #makeover-monday #map #mapbox #nyc #pizza #restaurants #yelp

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