Djoerd Hiemstra 🍉I love Mastodon and I research search engines, so when we set up a mastodon instance at the University of Twente, we planned to research federated search, who-to-follow recommendations, and trending topics. Students worked on this in one of our courses:
When engaging with the community, I quickly learnt that many tooters actively oppose search, recommendation and most other "algorithmic" tools. As a researcher in Information Retrieval I was kind of shocked: How could someone NOT like search??
Turns out, search can be easily misused to find persons to harass, searching for instance for "trans rights are human rights" and threaten all those persons is way to easy. Who-to-follow recommendations will then give the trolls more people to harass, as do trending topics. The lack of full-text search is a feature, not a bug or an omission.
If you think this is a relatively small problem, then read up on kiwifarms. (and If you think: "Well, but this doesn't affect me", then for goodness sake, please go back to Musk's sorry birdsite!)
So, I stopped researching (federated) search algorithms for Mastodon and social media in general. OpenWebSearch.eu for the win!
Ruth Mottram@djoerd that sounds really interesting, but I'm not quite sure I understand - is the aim to build a new web search engine?
@Ruth_Mottram We research possibilities for organisations (universities and other public research institutes like Radboud U. and CERN) to collaboratively crawl the web. We will provide an open web index that anyone may use to build a web search engine. Let a thousand googles bloom!
@djoerd that sounds really cool!