Who is following my blog?

A couple days ago, I was looking at the WriteFreely logs to find out why a follower was not being counted in the Stats page. While investigating the WriteFreely API later on, I was somewhat surprised that such information was not being exposed.

It turns out that the next version of WriteFreely will have both an endpoint and a detailed page to view the subscribers (I've just looked at the related PR). In the meantime, I decided to take a look at the database.

The following SQL query shows the public ID and URL of the followers (assuming the database is the one WriteFreely uses):

SELECT actor_id, url FROM remoteusers;

I've also found another interesting table that contains the users' public keys:

SELECT id, public_key FROM remoteuserkeys;

This of course got my interested in some more technical details of the ActivityPub format. I want to experiment a little with my own profile, but at the moment it is still unavailable so I'll hold off until I restore it.

#TIL #tech #fediverse