I don’t know a ton about the internals of federated systems, it’s been on my todo list for a while but it keeps getting pushed down by other things. But I still like that the fediverse exists and I’d like to pitch in, even if it’s only a few bucks of processor time / month.
Are there compute tasks that could be offloaded to a network of volunteers? Monitoring tools that could be run from outside the system? Something else I’m not thinking of?
Yea, ping times is a great idea. I’ve been debating what kind of location data to include. I think it should default to “nothing” but if users feel comfortable sharing rough location (Country, Province/Region/State, City, nothing more granular than that) that should be configurable and would be nice data to see. I suspect a lot of fediverse users pipe all their traffic through a VPN, and if users feel comfortable reporting which VPN they use, the data could show performance across those networks too.
If non-VPN’d users felt comfortable sharing their ISP, that would be useful as well to see if services are degraded on a particular provider. It would also be a warning bell against ISPs censoring federated services. I don’t think that’s happening now, but it would be nice to have some independent verification.