Tracking external follower lists

[erlend-sh]

One of the most basic services we can provide for a Mastodon account is to keep a record of all incoming/outgoing follows. That way if a user loses some of their connections as a result of an instance block, they can see in some sort of diff-view which connections were severed.

However, we don’t want people to use this as a way to ping them whenever they’ve been unfollowed by someone else, as that could encourage anti-social behavior like demanding every unfollower to explain their reasoning.

One mitigation is to simply avoid any notifications and merely keep a Connections page (with a history/diff-tab) in the user’s profile, so they can manually check in on that from time to time.

This is somewhat inadequate though, because instance blocks can happen silently, and so you wouldn’t necessarily know to check your connections history.

Is there a way for us to track the instance connections of a user’s instance? That way, if we can both detect that:

• instance-connection with writing.exchange has been lost
• 2 actor connections from writing.exchange have been lost

..then we could notify the user.

Thoughts @bumblefudge @aumetra ?