Well after 10 years or so with poduptime I finally realized that pod is very diaspora specific and its been many years where we have collected data from any server that supports nodeinfo from places like mastodon and friendica and lemmy etc. So it was time for a rebrand to https://fediverse.observer
Yes as the name implies we observe all servers in the fediverse.
Some nice updates to try and make it much easier for folks not as familiar with the fediverse and try to stop assuming foss and open source makes any sense to anyone.
As always the git code is linked and always happy for anyone to change, add, or improve things. I am no design expert and just ok at php.
I still do not have a location override for server owners, here is why:
Server location dictates the privacy laws, the terms of the server based on country, city, state, etc. The times folks have asked for a manual update were something like “I am in Maine, and my target users are in Maine. However I am hosting with hetzner out of falkenstein because they have great servers at a great price”. Well ok, we set the server location to falkenstein based on IP location because the that is where your users have to connect to and their performance will be impacted in Maine. Also you now need to follow the privacy laws of Germany and the speech laws of Germany, and Maine since that is where you are. When you hire a lawyer to finish your terms for the users you allow in, they will need to also understand the international law there etc. Your user base needs to understand these complexities of where there data is or is not sitting. Does GDPR apply now? Free Speech in Maine is not applicable in data sitting in Germany, how do you handle that? Does hiding behind a CDN like cloudflare make it more or less complex? Is that cached data also then sitting other places you are responsible for? So manual override does not tell the story poduptime the software tries to tell users, where is the server they are using. I have not figured out a way to make this work for all as a feature, so I have not coded anything to support it, nor plan to.