The general idea is cool, but I'm not sure about the implementation. I tried looking at the page for mastodon.social [0] and it didn't convey much information - I just see a page with some contact information for the admin, and a list of peers that is paginated to show only five peers at a time in apparently arbitrary order. Am I missing something?

I was expecting something like an explorable graph visualization that renders all the nodes (maybe scaled by number of users) and the edges (peering) between them. Have you tried building this, or do you think the data just wouldn't be too interesting since most peering relationships aren't unique?

e.g. I really like the Map of Reddit [1], and I'm not sure that the data of federated peers is enough to make something like this, but even a simplified version that just renders a graph on an infinite canvas would be fun to explore.

[0] https://mastoinstance.info/?instance=mastodon.social

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35602277

Cool! It completely freaks out (recent version of Firefox) when I search for `mastodon.se` (a dead instance).

First there's a bunch of requests made to mastodon.se, and then it gets stuck in a loop making a lot requests (or trying to at least) to https://null/... :D