Defederation Investigator
defed.xyz
Discover who has defederated your Fediverse instance with the Defederation Investigator.

A few months ago I released the Defederation Investigator, a tool to verify the federation status of Lemmy instances. With this new update, I’ve expanded it to support multiple Fediverse softwares, including:

  • Mastodon
  • Misskey
  • Mbin
  • Pleroma & Akkoma
  • Friendica

This works both ways: you can verify which Mastodon (et al) instances have defederated your Lemmy instance, as well as check the federation status of an instance running any of the supported softwares.

Like most of my works, this tool is FOSS and available on my team’s GitHub.

Limitations

Many microblogging platforms, Mastodon included, offer admins the possibility of hiding their blocklists from the public. As it turns out many instances have chosen this approach, so the available information can be pretty limited at times.

Also, this update has increased the pool of instances from a couple hundred to over 2 thousand, so query times have increased significantly. You can reduce them by deselecting some softwares from the query page (hint: most fedi instances are Mastodon ones, so by deselcting them you’ll cut out over half of the pool).

What about Kbin?

To my knowledge, Kbin doesn’t share its federation status through an API like most softwares do. Furthermore, given recent events, I have little faith in the Kbin project. Instead, I chose to support its community driven fork: Mbin.

What about Peertube and Pixelfed?

I tried looking through their API docs and wasn’t able to find any endpoints sharing either federation or defederation statuses. If anyone is familiar with any of these softwares and has any ideas on what to do to retrieve such information feel free to contact me, I’d love to add support for both.

What about …?

Want more softwares? Feel free to propose them. I’d like for this tool to support as many projects as possible.

  • Nerd02OPAEnglish
    4•4 months ago

    There seems to be some problem with your instance’s API. While the federation page works fine, when polling the defederation API at

    https://moist.catsweat.com/api/defederated

    I am getting the following error:

    {
    "type": "https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-10",
    "title": "An error occurred",
    "status": 500,
    "detail": "Internal Server Error"
}

    this also gets interpreted as an error by my tool, which is why the green “Instances defederated by …” sections is empty.

    • originalucifer
      1•4 months ago

      i am running the standard mbin, no mods. i suspect youd have the same issue with all mbin servers

      • Nerd02OPAEnglish
        6•4 months ago

        Actually I don’t. After having tested it on the biggest mbin instances, it worked fine on:

        However I did get the error on:

        • kbin.chat
        • kbin.life

        So whatever it is, it’s not just you. I’m afraid I can’t investigate any further without looking at some instance logs, though.

        • originalucifer
          4•4 months ago

          Fixed! my instance api was broken due to a pathing issue which is resolved, and your tool now functions as expected. thank you!

          • Nerd02OPAEnglish
            3•4 months ago

            Nice! Glad you were able to find and fix an issue with your instance.