Fediverse

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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.

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I created a site that helps people search the fediverse (programmer2514.github.io)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by TenorTheHusky@kbin.social to c/fediverse@kbin.social

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I had been having trouble getting meaningful results from the fediverse on Google, and after seeing this post, it seems I'm not the only one. So, I created a site that helps search the fediverse in your search engine of choice (it currently supports Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Dogpile).

Due to query limitations with most search engines, it currently only searches the top 15 lemmy/kbin instances, but I've tested it and it seems to provide access to a good chunk of fediverse content. The exception is Google, which should be far more reliable overall as well as providing the ability to search Mastodon and PeerTube.

If you have contributions or ideas for improvement, feel free to check out the project here or shoot me a message. Hope this helps people! :)

https://fedi-search.com/

Edit: Update in progress including improved search queries and support for Mastodon/PeerTube (Google only, unfortunately)

Edit 2: Update is live, along with a dedicated domain name. If the website doesn't look any different for you, try Ctrl+F5 or clearing site data - it seems some browsers are caching the old page.

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[–] TGRush@forum.fail 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hm, I find it somewhat annoying that right now, this is not really searching the Fediverse, but rather what we've come to call "the Threadiverse", which is all about Reddit-like content aggregators.

In other words, I'd love an option to search different kinds of content, like instead of Threadiverse-stuff searching the most popular mastodon, misskey, or pleroma instances just to name a few.

[–] TenorTheHusky@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm hoping to expand the project to hopefully be a bit more robust - I'll definitely keep this on my radar

[–] TGRush@forum.fail 3 points 1 year ago

Thank you so much for the consideration! <3

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Searching Mastodon is a bit of a.... contentious issue. A lot of smaller Mastodon-based sites are full of traumatized vulnerable people who really just want to do their own thing, and they'll rattle cages if they find out someone's indexing their sites or posts. If anyone's making third party search tools, it's best to be careful to respect discoverability and indexing flags.

[–] stochasticity@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I find this to be incredibly fair, but also makes it much harder to dive into the fediverse. Where is the middle ground do you think?

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mastodon has flags for opting in to discoverability features (being featured in the profile directory, and having posts be searchable via Mastodon's search bar) and for search engine indexing (for Google, bing, etc.).

Just don't return posts from users that have opted out of those, and things should be mostly ok.

[–] 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Just don't return posts from users that have opted out of those, and things should be mostly ok.

This is the main problem I see. User settings are part of the mastodon API. If you're building a general-purpose search engine, you use a crawler to index pages and your crawler has no idea those flags even exist.