In early November, when the Great Discontinuity happened, I began working on a Steampipe plugin to enable SQL queries versus the Mastodon API, in addition to a buddy Steampipe “mod” (suite of dashboards) to display and chart the results of those queries.I expect these dashboards will quickly be offered in Steampipe Cloud, where it will take just a couple of seconds to appear your Mastodon gain access to token (from, e.g., https://mastodon.social/settings/applications/new)and start utilizing the dashboards.Meanwhile, if you’re so inclined, you can discover the plugin here and the control panels here. If you’re reasonably technical you can quite rapidly and easily install Steampipe, clone these repos, develop the plugin , and begin utilizing the dashboards.Why would you wish to? My own inspiration, initially, was to do Mastodon analytics. I thought Steampipe’s SQLification of the API would be a convenient way to recognize and keep an eye on activity trends during a duration of remarkable flux. Which’s shown to be true,
to a minimal level. Here’s a snapshot of the dashboard that uses the circumstances activity API. IDG I’m seeing this chart with great interest. Where does it go from here? I’m not going to hazard a guess. Everything’s up in the air today, and anything could happen.But as I added tables to the plugin to encapsulate more of the Mastodon API, and added dashboards to visualize those tables, my focus shifted. I started to see the suite of control panels as a Mastodon reader/browser that complements the web and phone clients, which’s how I generally use them now. I believe the essential advantage is among Edward Tufte’s core concepts:
information density. Each of these control panels shows more activity than you can see at a look in the web or phone interfaces. I find this extremely handy for searching and browsing.
When I see items of interest that I want to interact with, I click through to the web app in order to increase, respond, or favorite.Will this way of browsing Mastodon appeal to you? To get a feel for what it’s like, here are snapshots of a few of the control panels I’ve developed up until now. dashboard.Favorites dashboard.Following dashboard.Home dashboard.List dashboard.Me dashboard.Notification dashboard.PeopleSearch dashboard.StatusSearch dashboard.TagSearch For me, at least, this approach has actually ended up being an effective method to search the fediverse, discover interesting individuals, read what they enhance, and keep an eye on my own activity.If you are dev-minded, by the method, please note that these control panels are simply one way to skin the outcomes of questions against the plugin. Any SQL customer can connect to Steampipe’s Postgres endpoint. You could utilize control panels like Metabase or Grafana, or you could embed Steampipe as a part in an app. Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc. Source
