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.
In all seriousness, Google needs to get on providing an easier way to specify that a search should hit the Fediverse. site:reddit.com works for Reddit, but there is presently no analogous operator on Google's search for a distributed system that spans many domains.
I mean, it's great that you've made this, don't get me wrong, but they really should do that as well.
Search Term intext:"Powered by kbin"
maybe?
but there is presently no analogous operator on Google's search for a distributed system that spans many domains.
Because that's just a basic search. A search engine searches across multiple domains by default. If you're specifically looking for only results from ActivityPub enabled services, that's pretty much an impossibility since there's no way to know (from a web crawl) if a page is served by a server that supports ActivityPub. Another problem is that a lot of fediverse instances purposefully block search engine crawlers because they don't want to appear in search results.
I like the idea of scrapping Google altogether, and just having "better" search engines here that account for federated decouplings/distributions
Not entirely the same, but I switched over to Presearch a year or so ago, just to get away from Google and the "big tech" corporations
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.
I'm hoping to expand the project to hopefully be a bit more robust - I'll definitely keep this on my radar
Thank you so much for the consideration! <3
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.
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?
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.
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.
Won’t let me upvote so I’m commenting to show love instead.
Pretty cool, thank you!
Good work bruv
Simple and handy, thanks!
Nice UI, thx.
dig it, works great
Awesome. Though I notice very little shows up from kbin.social; content I know is there is missing when I search for it. That may have more to do with the recency of the site growth or the cloudflare protection that was up a few days ago.
I would guess that it is the cloudflare protection, since that will have prevented crawlers from indexing the site while it was enabled.
Very cool! Thanks!
Suggestion: add Brave Search (search.brave.com) as an option as well. It's a smaller search engine but they have their own index and does not track users.
Will do o7
Edit: It seems Brave doesn't support chaining site specifiers, so my current method won't work with their search
Simple and to the point. Nice work!
very nicely done!
Would be great to have ecosia.org as an option for the search engine :)
Seems like you could probably use this strategy and get rid of the limits by turning this into an extension that would tack on the site list to the search directly(though, I'm unsure if there are such limits directly via the search box on Google or whomever).
I'd also, just from a code quality perspective, bust the list out into it's own property (which could later become smarter), and build the query string out at runtime.
Amazing! Great job! And thanks!
Down for me
thx
have you considered redirecting to whoogle or searx ? you can use farside.link which automatically redirects to a working instance. it would be helpful for people who want to avoid using Google
I will absolutely check this out, thanks for the suggestion!
Edit: I can't get searx working at all for me, but I went ahead and implemented whoogle support
Thank you! good idea!
That's fantastic! Thank you!
Thank you!
Thank you!!
just use kbin's native search
Each one has its upsides and downsides. Kbin's search is more convenient for certain use cases, but it suffers from the same problem as Reddit's search - it always sorts by new no matter what. In addition, it can only index instances with which kbin has federated. FediSearch should in theory index every instance, regardless of federation status, and do so in such a way that the most useful posts show first (assuming Google does its job).