I'm looking at the Fediverse explorer and I'm curious how to interpret the embeddings (or the distances between points). What does it mean when two instances are near each other (e.g., sigmoid.social and mastodon-belgium.be)? Is it related to the number of follows?

Currently I only use the peering information of instances. Instances are places close to each other when they are peering.

As a next step I want to refine this as peering itself does not say anything about how much users of these instances interact. For this I will have to sample the users of instances and who they follow.

I did also want to see a picture, presumably the point of the lib is to make a nice layout of nodes even though that then has to be rendered with another tool?

Yes, I built it as a replacement for the networkx spring_layout function.

Could you not give input and output examples for the graphs? I.e. show networkx before and after your positioning?

Also how well will this scale for large numbers of nodes, say thousands? Currently using networkx I have to perform tens of thousands of iterations on the spring_layout to get quite mediocre results.

I've two models implement, one of which is the networkx model, which I would recommend at the moment.

I implemented this because networkx was to memory consuming and too slow.

Where networkx crashed with 24k nodes I was able to embed them with this library, it will still take several hours, but at least it's doable. The number of iterations should be on same magnitude as the number of nodes. For my graph #Iteration = 1/2 #nodes was sufficient.