A Bloomberg terminal for Mastodon
As I mentioned last time, the Steampipe dashboard for Mastodon has evolved in unexpected ways. I imagined that the components — a plugin that maps Mastodon APIs to Postgres foreign tables, and a suite of views that query the APIs — would combine to enable a broad overview of activity in the fediverse. That didn’t pan out for two reasons.
First, I learned that the Mastodon community didn’t appreciate the kind of surveillance required for such analysis. That was the original community, I should stress, and things have changed dramatically, but I want to respect the original ethos. Plenty of people will, nevertheless, crawl and index the fediverse, but I don’t need to put my shoulder to that wheel. And if I did I’d be pushing Steampipe out of its sweet spot: realtime acquisition, querying, and visualization of API-sourced data.