Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Is there a way to search through posts across all instances/communities? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, I'm relatively new here. Like probably a lot of people, I appended the word "reddit" to most of my searches to get discussions around my interests/news or to find "curated" things. I noticed that it does not work as great with "Lemmy" for example, as the user base is more spread out and smaller in general.

I've looked for a search engine for the Lemmy or fediverse with no luck. There exists some to find communities but not to return posts it seems.
If it does not exists, is this even something that can be built? Would one need to build a crawler or use an API? I would be very interested to contribute to such a project.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

A search engine that literally covers all of the Fediverse with no exception has to even know about brand-new instances that have just been started a split-second ago. An instance that’s so new doesn’t even have any connections into the Fediverse yet, probably no content and only one account, the admin account. (Replace “account” with “channel” on Hubzilla and (streams).)

So if someone spins up a new instance of whatever project, that search feature has to know about that instance immediately before the instance even connects with anything.

Yes, but who would want a search engine to specifically cover emtpy servers with half a nanosecond lifetime? For all practical intents and purposes, people search for content, which already excludes these theoretical edge cases. More realistically, people will search for quality content, which implies some engagement happened and some upvotes accumulated. There is no value in discovering servers before users discovered them, on the contrary.

If you really care about new and empty servers, you're rather looking for a fediverse monitoring tool than a search engine. And even for those, it's questionable what the value of those entries would be. I would prefer if they are filtered out to not bloat the numbers.