StrypeyI get really frustrated with the limitations of fediverse search some days. I want to search for whether @user, who I follow (or is me), posted anything with the tag #HashTag. Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to program this kind of cross-referencing into the search tools in fediverse apps. But I've yet to see it done.
FeralRobotsTo paraphrase #GeorgeBox, all #analogies are wrong, but some are useful.
Lot of folks involved in the #FediverseSearch discussions get really hung up on the VERY SPECIFIC DETAILS of their analogies. It's not a coffee shop or a pedestrian zone, it's a social network. It's literally unlike any of the things folks are analogizing with.
So very much #ThirdRail in this. There's #FediverseSearch, there's "teh #algorithm", there's local vs special-interest vs general-subject instance vs "big social."
I'm going to make a prediction: Within 6 months there will be a more or less widely-used service that analyses #fediverse traffic & surfaces trends for browsing.
(There's even #MissedQuoteBoost as here I am making explicit stuff that's only in the original post if you read it in context.)
https://calckey.social/notes/9fb3vtag3u
@maegul
@[email protected] @[email protected] I don’t think I agree. There are plenty of reasons to aggregate with people, and while going for regionyal for the purposes of communicating during nyatural disasters can be helpful, it’s probably rare enough and capable enough of being addressed by other solutions that it just won’t catch on. If anything, I think following your argument through gets to being against decentralisation and algorithms. Twitter knew which city I was in and knew to prioritise those earthquake tweets, or so it seems. Only reliably possible with big social at the moment. What happens when there’s an incident that isn’t a nyatural disaster in my region but just as important to me and my family or communities? A regionyally specific instances won’t be much help then, but big social with algorithms would probably have a better chance.
Post from a #Calckey node about #fediverse response to #earthquakes (& by extension, other #NaturalDisasters).
Short version: #Mastodon doesn't do very well; Calckey does much better, because the user is able to quickly surface non-#hashtagged conversations.
Great illustrations of why #FediverseSearch is good, actually, & why #hashtags aren't a substitute for #search.
#MissedQuoteBoost #MastodonSearch
https://calckey.social/notes/9fb2lj1yam
@maegul
Ok, nice little social media experiment, how does the fediverse fare during an earthquake? A midnight earthquake just hit my home city, which basically never gets earthquakes. Probably no damage at all from this one, but we all definitely felt it, which is unusual for us! (Prob ~4 on Richter scale) Where did I go first to check if others felt it? NGL, the place I went last time there was a tremor … Twitter. And to be fair, on the top of my feed were posts from people I follow (who aren’t here) that live in my home city, tweeting about it, including links to official reports. This was very nice, as this time I was scared and thought my apartment building might be in trouble. I quickly check #mastodon and #calckey. Nothing in timelines. Not surprising, I don’t really follow anyone or many that live in the same city as me. Searching, mastodon’s hashtag search does ok, and surfaces a bot or two that also confirm the quake (@[email protected]). But not many people, I’m not really finding a conversation. Also searching for something by a hashtag you don’t know exists takes a few steps. This is on an instance with ~50k users. #Calckey’s full text search though (on calckey.social)? Quicker. Just typed earthquake without worrying about hashtags. And better results. More people were brought up, which is kinda what you’re after from social media during an event … reassurance. It was also surprising, as calckey has only ~2k users and therefore smaller visibility of the fediverse, but still gave me more connectivity just through search than my bigger mastodon instance. Which is really an interesting demonstration of how hashtags can be problematic. Plenty of people were reaching out, asking “anyone feel that earthquake?”, they just forgot or didn’t think to use a hashtag, and so couldn’t find me through mastodon. And why would you in a (slightly) nervous situation like that. “Hmmm, is this the best hashtag, do you think people will search for it … I should probably check if it exists first?” … is not a thought goes through your mind. I basically never visit Twitter since I left, but this was a nostalgic little episode. It was nice to see the fediverse wasn’t really behind big social. Though the lack of discovery facilities on mastodon really did show themselves here.
Every post in the #fediverse that isn't public should be encrypted. This should be the default, so that to post publicly, a person has to know what they're doing and turn it off. That way, anyone who wants to build search and discovery tools for public posts can do so without permission, or fear of retribution.
Discuss.
ShoqI get some objections to fediverse search, but honestly, I cant' see why anyone thinks this "network" can thrive without it. The simplest recall of things gone by is awkward to impossible without search, and it's just a vitally important tool for the future of online humanity.
Any tool can be abused. That's what moderation is for. It was one thing when fedi was experimental, and served as a needed refuge for some groups, but it's far more beyond that now. We need #fediverseSearch. Full stop.
Dušan MitrovićRemember that even if the data itself is public, it's still subject to existing copyright laws, all of whom pretty much say that unless stated otherwise, we as the authors have exclusive rights over how our content is used.
Please, don't make us file endless GDPR compliance requests. It complicates matters for all of us.
#fedisearch #searchengine #fediversesearch #optin #optout #consent
Jeff Piestrak@SocialCoop Thanks for the heads up! I had been peripherally aware of this discussion but not its relevance to this question.
That thread ended up becoming quite a tangled web for me to follow. To make sense of it all I posted a fairly lengthy comment summarizing what I thought to be the current state of things related to #relays and #FediverseSearch functionalities:
https://www.loomio.com/d/rMEXaFgp/adding-relay-instances/31
Corrections, additions, or other comments welcomed there and here!
Adding Relay Instances
Hi all,I recently posted a poll about some smaller instances that invited us to join their network of relays. I was surprised to find that the poll overwhelmingly voted negative, and while I respect that this is the community position I was also surprised that Loomio polls didn't really allow for discussion, and I think the majority of the comments left were people who didn't understand what relays were (my mistake!), or focused on a specific aspect of the community that asked us to join which I mentioned off handedly, but wasn't that important. I wanted to open up discussion on the issue and see if others felt differently or if it's just me who thinks this is an important act of solidarity on the fediverse!First, here's what the admin page says about relays:A federation relay is an intermediary server that exchanges large volumes of public posts between servers that subscribe and publish to it. It can help small and medium servers discover content from the fediverse, which would otherwise require local users manually following other people on remote servers.The network in question included several small, new instances mostly aligned around love of bicycles, green transport, and cities. However, the network was not specifically targeting those topics, instead it was trying to expand its timeline to give its users a broad set of interests for them to discover and they thought the values and posters on our instance would be a good fit. Someone commented in the vote that since we'd be the biggest instance we'd be increasing their database size disproportionately, and to be clear, this is true, but they invited us and are aware, the idea is that this gives their users an easier way to discover content they like.I also saw a few comments that said they didn't necessarily want our federated timeline swamped with bicycle content, however these instances are a lot smaller than us so the converse of the previous point is also true: from our instances perspective nothing really changes since users of this instance are likely already following users from those instances and many (if not all) of the posts are likely showing up in the federated timeline already. For now, as the biggest instance, we'd mostly just be helping populate their timeline.Another voter in the poll mentioned that they wouldn't be comfortable joining relays unless it was clear how other members are chosen, which is absolutely fair! In this case, members are chosen only if all servers on the relay vote to add the instance, so for our vote we could start a poll or find some other process.In general I think relaying with smaller instances is a good way to help them get started. It helps users not think that mastodon is "boring" because their instance doesn't have much content on it and it helps us in our mission to support building a kinder social network. I'm not necessarily asking us to re-consider the poll right now, just for a bit of discussion: am I right here, or totally wrong? How do we feel about joining relays in the future?
wavenumberFull-text search your own Mastodon posts with R
It explains how to use the rtoot package in R to search through one’s own Mastodon posts. It covers how to install the package, how to use it to search for one’s own account ID, how to retrieve posts and create a searchable table, and how... https://ergosum.one/2022/12/19/fulltext-search-your.html
ProtectiveHen@qjurecic If you are trying to connect on a topic outside your followers, using #hashtags here is really essential. #MastodonSearch #FediverseSearch. See this:
https://midrange.tedium.co/issues/how-mastodon-search-works/
https://midrange.tedium.co/issues/how-mastodon-search-works/
