I feel like there should be an "are you alive" federation activity in activitypub, as well as an "I'm back" activity.
Servers go up and down enough that maybe it should be part of the spec
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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A heartbeat activity! Or maybe a ping.
I like it! Maybe I'll write an FEP for it, lol.
You mean like if there's a community called [!cats@example.com](/c/cats@example.com) and your home instance no longer federates with the instance example.com?
If so, I'll add that to Tesseract as it sounds useful.
this would be an amazing addition! It would help avoid the disconnect between de-federated instances/communities
Added :) I also disabled the "Create Post" button if the community is on a defederated instance even though, technically, you can still post to your instance's local copy (it just won't federate).
Edit: This only works one way. i.e. it can only know if your instance is defederated from the community's. If the community's instance is defederated from yours, there will be no indicator because there's no way to do it without a remote lookup which is both unreliable and inefficient at scale.
Are you the creator of Tesseract? I love it except it doesn't save my settings or my favorites and multi-communities. I'm not sure why and I've checked in the last 2 weeks. It's been doing it a long time.
Bonfire just instituted a "Federated" flag in their alpha. I think this could be useful.
The best tool I know of is the Federation Checker, but something like it should definitely should be built into clients.
Notably, Beehaw is defederated from .world and sh.itjust.works, while dbzer0, quokk.au, and anarchist.nexus are defederated from feddit.org.
That's a handy tool, thanks for posting it. Do you happen to know how the lists are sorted? It's not alphabetical.
Not sure how; it's also not by defederation date, otherwise feddit.org would be at or near the bottom of the list for dbzer0.
This is already in nightly, you can see it on the test instance here https://voyager.lemmy.ml/c/photography@lemmy.ml
Make sure you visit in a browser aince apps wouldn't have implemented an in development feature.
PieFed does this.
How does this work anyway, and does it match with Lemmy's approach?
I noticed crust was saying my dev instance was not federating anymore, which was neat. It was because I don't leave my dev instance online all the time 😁
It looks like this - https://piefed.social/c/adultswim@lemm.ee
Thanks, I mean, how does this work in the backend?
Oh :)
Once per day a request is made all instances to retrieve the list of their admins. If that request fails then they're flagged as 'dormant'. If dormant for 5 days, flagged as 'gone forever' and then PieFed doesn't try to federate with them again and all their communities have that warning on them.
If any Activity arrives from a dormant / gone instance then it's restored to full operation.