Fediverse

Fediverse
Status	Special case
Archiving status	Special case
Archiving type	Unknown
IRC channel	#fedisperse (on hackint)

The Fediverse is a network of interoperating servers used for web publishing. Due to the federation, instances are constantly joining the network or disappearing.

The main protocol used in the fediverse is ActivityPub. Many software platforms exist; the most widely used ones as of early 2019 are Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, Friendica, GNU social, and WriteFreely.

ArchiveTeam and the Fediverse

In May 2019, AT (or at any rate, what was seen from the outside as AT-as-a-unitary-actor) archived a Mastodon server called berries.space^{[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]}, which caused blowback. Subsequently AT adopted a policy of not archiving Fediverse instances unless we get permission from the owners. This held until AT's de facto current leadership signaled that it is no longer a thing in 2023, but since then we haven't archived any Fediverse instances anyway due to its (i.e. Mastodon instances') heavy use of Javascript - and the expected post-buyout exodus from Twitter not really happening, making this less of a priority than we might've thought.

JavaScript Workarounds

Most Fediverse instances use Mastodon, which requires JavaScript, which calls Mastodon APIs to retrieve data.

zygolophodon is a command-line client for the Mastodon APIs, and a patchset for it is aiming to add an option to output URLs for archiving, including JavaScript based pages, the API requests they make and RSS URLs as well as outlink URLs. Not production ready yet and only intended for targeted archiving.

The ThreadTree service is a thread "unroller" for Mastodon URLs that outputs plain HTML with no JavaScript requirement. Currently it has some issues that make it suboptimal for archiving, but it can still work OKish.