16
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Help: Is there a way to search the fediverse in one place, instead of just my server / instance?
Hi everyone, I'm quite new to working the cross-server world of the Fediverse. Is there a way to search the Fediverse in one place, instead of just my server / instance?
For example, being able to search for #cats in not just my Mastodon server / instance, but on the others as well? And if it can search Lemmy and others as well, that would be AMAZING.
Not really. Lack of global search is considered a feature, not a bug, since it prevents bad actors from searching up a word (e.g. "trans") and harassing anyone/everyone who is using it.
The entire paradigm is fundamentally different from other forms of social media; you need to change your understanding of discoverability, and focus on building connections organically via the local timeline, boosts, and finding friends-of-friends. In the end, you'll find this much healthier overall.
While I understand the segregation of the metaverse into various instances, it does make it much more difficult to engage with as an outsider. Discoverability is still an important feature for new users trying to familiarise themselves with a community.
Surfacing and sharing information like popular topics can definitely be abused to create dark patterns, but it can also be leveraged to encourage positive community engagement and harmonious cycles.
Sure, and when designing such an ecosystem, one has to make a choice where to land on the spectrum that lies between discoverability and abuse. In this case, the decision was made to side against abuse; that decision is now baked into the community. The paradigm is the paradigm, there's not a huge amount of point arguing with me about whether it's "correct".
So anyone who discusses whether or not they like something is just arguing with you? I won't go so far as to say you're assuming bad faith per se, but you're definitely stifling discussion by calling it an argument.
That makes more sense, thank you. I ask as I saw yesterday that each Mastodon instance has its own trends? And one of them was more interesting to me than what was in my instance. So now I have to go to all the Mastodon instances to see what they're talking about? (Note: I don't want to trend, or even be seen.)
It's more about the fact that more people are actively talking about something you might like. Whereas if you just started talking about something and # it, for example #NoSurf then it might just sit there and collect dust.
But mostly, it's because I see that some instances actually have the # that I want to discuss, or that there is a conversation about it already that I can join. So finding others like me that want to talk about the same thing, is much harder, as I have to scour all the instances of Mastodon, then go to Lemmy, etc. Again, this is mostly to find others to connect with, not for spam or trending.
Again, you are trying to look at this as if it's as "one global conversation" like Twitter was. It isn't Twitter, its a completely different ecosystem and paradigm with only surface-level similarities. The community simply isn't organized the same way.
If you want "one big conversation about cats", you need to look elsewhere; there are many places that fit this bill. But if you want to make friends with people who like cats, find the people on your timeline who are posting about cats and follow them. Then see who they follow, and you'll probably find there are more cat people. You'll soon build a localised, more personal and direct community around cats.
Are there? Personally, it'd be what I want, but I can't think of a platform that would fit my need without harvesting my data or pulling horseshit with algorithms.
I didn't say those places wouldn't harvest your data or pull horseshit with algorithms: /r/cats is a great place to have one big conversation about cats. So is the twitter search for "cats".
If you want a place that has one big conversation about cats, and doesn't have the other things, you're welcome to build one. What's not really OK is showing up in a long-established platform and community that meets 50% of your needs (no algo), and then trying to force it to change to fit your desire for the other 50% (searchability).
Edit: parentheses
Just to clarify:
So it's down to my pure ignorance. But thanks for the explanations, you and the others have helped a lot in explaining it to me. :-)
Unfortunately, it really sucks for discussion of cats. It's really one big "pics or GTFO."
Clever idea, maybe just focus on the people in my server's posts and go from there.
Ah, this can be a bit challenging with Mastodon because there are so many diverse instances.
If you have a lot of diverse interests and they're things that are generally popular, you might be best served by joining a very large instance. For example, I joined Fosstodon because I'm primarily interested in software development, but since it's a very large instance, I have access to a lot of posts about my other interests like motorcycling and retro gaming. It's harder to get that diversity in a small Mastodon instance because they tend to federate with far fewer servers.
However, a small Mastodon instance can be advantageous if it targets a niche interest that you want to engage in. For example, I'm a big fan of Old-School RuneScape, but that's a community whose posts rarely make it into Fosstodon. I'm sure if I joined a more general-interest instance or a gaming-specific instance, I'd probably see more. As things are now, I'm happy with having my single account on Fosstodon.
To help with your search, check out Instances.Social if you haven't already. It provides a searchable index of Mastodon instances and their descriptions (but not posts). You can also filter by certain attributes you want (or don't want). You might find it helpful to find an instance you like.
Greatness, thanks for this! It's probably the closest to what I need. :-)
Thanks for this, makes a lot more sense now, just didn't know this before I started. I'm on a big one from what I understand as well, Mastodon.social.
As explained by @pArSeC, it's partially a design choice that you can't search for arbitrary text and find related posts.
However, the restriction doesn't apply to hashtags. When you search for
#cats, you will see all posts on all instances—but there's an important caveat.For technical reasons, it's not actually possible to search across all instances. When you search for a hashtag, your instance will return all the matching posts that it knows about. However, there are multiple reasons why your instance might not know about certain posts:
So even ignoring the decision for Mastodon to disallow arbitrary text search, its actually impossible (or very impractical) to search across all Mastodon instances, even for hashtags.
There have been a few projects over the years that attempted to index as many Mastodon instances as possible and offer arbitrary text search, but they've always been very poorly received by the community due to the potential for harassment and targeted attacks. However, that might change now that Lemmy has exploded in popularity, increasing the value of arbitrary text search within the Fediverse.
If only Matrix had made such wise design choices.
If Matrix wants to be a usable chat app it needs to give up on this weird dream of being a jack of all trades data transport layer.
They're compromising on the wrong stuff which ends up making the experience worse for everyone, resulting in silos such as Signal and WhatsApp being able to easily overtake them on the parts that actually matter.
Oh wow okay it's all starting to make more sense now, thank you for taking the time to reply in such detail. :-)
The few times I've seen people announce they made a global fediverse search, people got really upset about it and were really nasty towards them over it.
I get that some people have privacy concerns about it, but I got the sense from a lot of the posts I saw from people who were against it that they thought that going after individuals doing it was going to stop large companies from doing it (even if just in secret).
I think that's a problem because instead of discussing ways to prevent a bad actor from doing it, everyone essentially just said "no!" and expected that to be the end of it.
Having global search not be part of the protocol/the developers of some of the implementations stating they won't implement it doesn't mean that it's difficult to do.
I think that it's actually easier to do indexing of activitypub servers because instead of having a bunch of html that may or may not be well formed and using semantic tags, you've got a well-defined set of objects (sure there's a ton of flexibility for extending them that can be annoying when implementing a client, but most server implementations have pretty similar usage so it's probably not a huge issue to miss a few uncommon extension fields in a search index) and a protocol for discovering new servers/users.
In fact, now that Meta has released their own activitypub-enabled service, I could easily see them implementing a global search and all of the ways I've seen people talking about trying to keep Meta out (usually just by blocking their instance) seem like they'd be quite easy to circumvent given Meta's resources.
Here's a pretty thorough post about the topic from the end of 2022 by someone that was interested in making a global search.
What I'd like is the multi protocol app like what Pidgin was for IM.
The one app that can do the mastodon, lemmy and peertube.
Then it could perhaps provide a unified search interface.
They all use the same protocol already; that's the whole point. The difference between these is at the presentation layer.
Ok wrong term, sure.