I have a fair amount of experience with data visualization, analysis etc and thought it would be a fun project to try to visualize the Lemmy network, specifically which instances have strong links to one another via subscriptions from users in one to communities in the other.
How/where can I get that data?
EDIT: It sounds like many people would find this a violation of their data privacy and I simply shouldn’t do it. I had thought this kind of data was intended to be entirely accessible by design, but I learned something new!
Sorry for commenting again but I think there is a way for you to do this in a completely open, easy, and privacy-preserving way. You don’t need to access their database.
Get a list of instances that you want to look at the subscription patterns for. (All the instances here + Lemmy.world)
Go to that instance’s website, click the “Communities” tab at the top, and then click “All” It shows how many users from that instance are subscribed to that community (both communities from that instance and outside of that instance)
If you find a way to automatically (or manually) scrape this data from all of those websites you can create the visualization that you were talking about.
So you were right, the data is open source it is just specific to each website.