It's strange to me that people are so focused on quote toots (which would be nice but I don't have particularly strong feelings about) when, in my opinion, what Mastodon desperately needs is a functional search bar. There is no better way to find out what is going on with a given topic.
Yeah, I know about hashtags, and I really don't think they are a suitable replacement.
@AbandonedAmerica Quite a few people seem to be very opposed to search because bad actors might use it to harass or dox people.
Those fears may be legitimate, but I suspect they underestimate how many people are already sitting on full-text indexes of fediverse posts. It looks to be a one-line change for a server admin to remove the current restrictions on ElasticSearch, and other ActivityPub software like Friendica already has full-text search.
@AbandonedAmerica I don't think there's a good way to address those concerns while maintaining a federated network that's open to the public. Bad actors will build search indexes regardless of anyone else's preferences and it's probably impossible to stop them by technical means.
It wasn't a problem when the Fediverse wasn't on their radar, but recent DoS attacks suggest that it is now. I don't have a good answer for people concerned they'll be targeted using search.
Meanwhile the rest of us are deprived of a useful search feature, and anyone who attempts to build one transparently gets bullied.
@zak @AbandonedAmerica
As you say, this is an issue with the content being open. What seems to me to be needed is a way to flag content IN A PAGE as non-indexable...& then get Google/et al to honor that. (Which may be infeasible, I don't know how page crawling works at that scope.)
E.g., if you marked your post 'noindex', then your post isn't indexed.
It'd need to extend to quote-boost implementations, too.
@FeralRobots
There's also a noarchive value.
Let me know if I shall hook you up to SEO wizards here.
@RyunoKi @zak
Just to be clear in order to work in a social media context, the search spider would have to pass over (or the search engine not retain/index) anything in a container that's flagged noarchive or noindex, respectively.
Do you know if major search spiders work that way now? It's been too long since I had to know this stuff for work. This is only slightly more than curiosity for me, though that same may not be true for @AbandonedAmerica.
@FeralRobots
Well, on the web client the time appears to be loaded with AJAX.
So unless there is a special treatment for crawlers they wouldn't see the toots.
Assuming noone queries the API and renders them server-side somewhere.
Abandoned America
Zak
FeralRobots
Ryuno-Ki