@probgoblin Nah. I'm going to trawl issues in GitHub and dig into the API to see if I can't come up with something. I'm not a big fan of follow bots.

@probgoblin AFAICT the API was created to integrate with only one instance. But, I think you could create uh sort of "trojan" accounts on every instance you want to know about, and hack the way the API is meant to be used to allow for searching across all those instances. Then you could create a way easily retoot those in your instance. But, that sort of goes against the ActivityPub core concept, and is a hack anyway. Looks the API is not the solution.

@stephen
I've created an account to manually pull some instances into federation. I actually DON'T like the idea of an automated tool as I would like to keep the Federated TL curated to a degree.

I've found a Public TL preview tool that's somewhat useful to check out an instance but I want a sort of category between individual instances and the full Fediverse.

Like... constellations of similar instances that you can federate with at will.

@probgoblin I still feel like having follow accounts, even if they are fully curated, kind of distorts the fediverse. It adds a non-real person to people's follower counts. Not that I'm worried about follow count accuracy, but if it's an account that's read-only, that kind of screws with things. That said, I don't know of a better option for the moment.

@stephen
Well, I also have my @news account that my users auto follow (this way they don't have to follow me and my smooth brain ramblings but can still know when I'm going to uh oh the instance) so I am not sure the real/fake dichotomy is that important.