https://fedisearch.xyz A small project of mine, feel free to submit users and other things here.
Fediverse Search API
A simple JSON-based API for getting information on all things Fediverse.
Hosted at https://fediversewiki-api.herokuapp.com/
The fedisearch.xyz website however, I host it at my personal server.
Preview;
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Contributing
To submit a search form to the API, add these variables to data/characters.json
{
"name": "John Doe",
"alternate_names": "",
"gender": "Male",
"category": "Novelist",
"description": "",
"fediverse": "@JohnDoe@instance.tld",
"link": "https://instance.tld/@JohnDoe",
"image": "https://fediversewiki-api.herokuapp.com/images/john-doe.jpg",
"language": "English",
"region": "Sweden",
"user": true,
"group" : false,
"creator": true,
"companyOrganization": false,
"project": false,
"applicationSoftware": false
}
and also add a corresponding profile picture in public/images with a 1x1 aspect ratio.
notes
note; “fediverse” form work as link handle. for things like applications, instead of the fediverse handle insert the website name/short link "fediverse": "sitename.com",
multiple categories and subcategories if longer than 10 letters has to be added spaces in-between, "category": "Applications/Software" >> "category": "Applications/ Software" or else the description would be pruned.
The API
You don’t need an API key to use the api, so technically fediverse applications like mastodon can utilize this for their search results.
What is submitted?
the things you can submit is as follows;
- All users, groups.
- Creators.
- related companies and organization.
- projects.
- applications/software.
that’s what the filtering could do as for now. general users can submit themselves in the search.
It’s kind of imperfect as of now, people have to manually put in search results so it makes sense you didn’t get anything. I’m still working on making a submit button but then I’ll make something like a crawler so It’ll work like any search
I don’t get it… Where am I going to get the results from that I should manually put in if the search engine doesn’t let me search anything to begin with??
Also, any rough estimate of when the crawler will be usable?
I already made the crawler just today. for now it works on mastodon instances. but now the search engine doesn’t work so I have to use a more powerful one. It’ll be ready around 1-3 days.
PS: the search I used is still barebones so that’s probably why you didn’t have results. also this doesn’t crawl posts, articles and etc. not yet at least. it only gets user profiles. maybe once I have a server that doesn’t have 1gb ram I’ll make it more extensive.
once I release the next version most of the problems it had will probably be fixed.
oh, 3 days is not that bad. I thought it might take you several months of continuous, back breaking work LOL. I can wait 3 days standing on my head (manner of speaking).
And yeah, I was actually interested in scraping posts / articles for keywords that I can market on. But, no hurry! One step at a time and we will eventually get there :)
If you manage to keep your little software updated and relevant - and as Mastodon grows bigger (I’m thinking of getting 100s of millions of people using it across all instances) - you will have a goose that lays golden eggs. It will be a real value for marketers, you could probably charge $100s per month for its usage but I obviously don’t recommend it because then I’d be left out cause I don’t have that kind of money yet :p
Anyway, keep up the good work! I’ll give your improved search engine a new try in 3 days… or 7… or however long it takes…
I’ll maybe just ask for donations so I can keep the servers up and maybe upgrade it without me paying for it. nothing like putting ads or making people pay annually for a premium price. after all this is an open community.
I’m doing all this while not knowing how to code. I’m learning stuff as I go on. yeah… probably 3 days.
agreed with the non-ads route. Kudos to you :)
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