Mastodawn

am asking for help pls, from whizbang expert #sharkey / #misskey / #calckey / #firefish [RIP] users.

my eternal struggle to make my sharkey #antennas behave is continuing, & i seem still to be losing the battle.

i have an #antenna for tracking my geek interests, called "geekery". the full list of its followed keywords is provided further below.

historically this antenna would be plagued by heaps of invalid posts that had nothing to do with any of my topical interests, attracted afaict by my attempts to get posts relating to #Arch, as in #ArchLinux, viz random posts that used the calendar month "March", or discussed "archive" or "archaeology", "architecture", & every other irrelevant variant out there.

last night i discovered https://thefedi.wiki/firefish/user/antennas, & was excited to see an apparent solution, via this example:

Tip You can also use the quotes to be very specific in your search.
For example, if I enter bee I will get posts with the word 'bee', but also 'been' and 'beer'. So use quotes and a space:

“bee ”so i edited my antenna's keywords accordingly:

#aboutconfig
#anonsysnet
"#arch "
#archies
#archinstall
#archlinux
"#aur "
#debian
#distrobox
#dropbearpooterising
#farcebookspace
#fedora
#firefox
#firefoxbeta
#firefoxnightly
#firefoxsecondsidebar
#firejail
#floorp
"#foss "
#fossemojis
#freebsd
#gnucash
#immutable
#kalpa
#kde
#kdelinux
#kdeos
#kdeplasma
#kinoite
#kmymoney
#kvm
#libreoffice
#libvirt
"#linux "
#linuxwomen
#microos
#openbsd
#opensocialspace
#opensuse
#penguinistas
#phanpy
"#plasma "
#qemu
#searx
#searxng
#sengi
#sharkey
#sidebery
#statuzer
#treestyletab
#tumbleweed
#userjs
#virtmanager
"#vm "
#vpn
#wayland
#windowrules
#windscribe
#xfce
" arch "

yet, this antenna still attracts numerous unrelated irrelevant posts, like:
https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajneoti8bb0i051v
https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajndfxrvsgre048b
https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajneh8mc0ovs04z3
https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajnefa540ovs04xu
https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajndxnvsbb0i04mk
https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajndk154ymls04kh

i'd be so grateful if someone pls could advise me what i'm doing wrong 🥺🤞

Antennas [The Fediverse Wiki]

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Ada Mar 10

@MsDropbear42 Antenna have been re-written since they were implemented on Firefish. They worked really well, but they had a huge resource impact that made them non scalable.

They're more efficient, but dumber now. I don't think they do much with quotes and spaces. I've basically had to resort to using only hashtags in my antenna, unless the word in question is only used in the context I want.

One thing you could try though is instead of " arch ", try arch linux on a single line without quotes That will only show you results for posts that mention both of those words (though they could be anywhere in the post, not always together, so they can still give you false hits). But it would mean that your first couple of results wouldn't have shown up on your antenna for example, because even though they mention arch, they don't mention linux.

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Droppie Mar 10

@ada salutations & ta for helping 🤗 atm am down a whole other wascally wabbit burrow, but later today once i've de-spelunked, i shall try out your suggestions. tis quite sad though to hear that we cannot actually lockdown our keywords via spaces & inverted commas, coz afaict that would have entirely solved my problem [hence my bamboozlement when it didn't seem to help].

when you say

instead of " arch ", try arch linux on a single line without quotesi wonder these two things:

- was my hitherto " arch " just being treated simply as plain old arch, thus capturing all & sundry?
- if arch linux really will capture posts even with both words being non-contiguous, do we simply have no way at all to enforce contiguousness?

🤯

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lynfox

@MsDropbear42 @ada

Would " arch linux " work?
It should eliminate false positives, but might miss some thing that has both words with something between them.
Eg: my favourite os is arch in linux

Unless the quotes are just being ignored when there is no #

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Droppie Mar 10

@lynfox @ada hi lyn, heehee. until Ada's helpful but disappointing advice yesterday, that certainly was one i was going to try, but once she said that the current code sadly ignores the quotes & leading+trailing spaces, it seemed to me that i was simply defeated in my goal to tightly delineate my antennae tag hit accuracy. bwaaaah.

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Droppie Mar 10

@ada @lynfox ack, here's another example, from another of my #antennae, one for many of my "non-geek" hashtags, in which one of my desired tags is

#grammarbut the aggravating lack of finesse in the code here means that false-hits like https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajonn72w5mjd02lr also occur.

this is getting really frustrating. i love #Friendica, but atm am in a transitional phase reconsidering staying with it, or returning here to my #Sharkey account... & ironically the prime determinant both ways is hashtags. Friendica is excellent at letting users tightly refine their tag searches to eliminate such false-hits, but i recently learned the code is inefficient thus causes high resource demand on the servers, thus is a major issue for small instances with modest HW. otoh Sharkey seems adept at fetching all my tags no wukkas... just lotsa garbage along with them. gaaaah.

A. Rivera (@[email protected])

> A lot of journalism folks are offering editing advice as Grammarly’s AI “experts” https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/a-lot-of-journalism-folks-are-offering-editing-advice-as-grammarlys-ai-experts/ In the #BadEconomy. No, it is not actual folks; Grammarly's is stealing those experts' content for their #AiSlop #sloperator #tech #Grammarly #academia #HigherEd

Blåhaj Zone

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Droppie Mar 10

@ada @lynfox oh well, another bright idea failed. re that grammar false hit, i wondered if maybe wildcards work, so i added

grammar* to the Exclusions box for that #antenna, reloaded the timeline, &... unfortunately saw that false-hit remained there, ergo, apparently no, wildcards do not work either. this is pretty annoying now.

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Ada Mar 10

@MsDropbear42 @lynfox Back in the Calckey days, Kaity implemented a full regex based search for antenna, which was wonderful. But since moving to out of the box Sharkey, we run with the defaults, and they aren't as powerful, both for performance reasons, but also, because I simply think it's mostly been left "as is" from the Misskey original implementation

which was wonderful

@ada @lynfox just btw, in order to balance things a bit here, having been away from my account here for several months, despite my #antenna angst, in so many other ways #Sharkey / #blahajzone has just so many really lovely QoL UI UX goodies! 👍❤️💃🥳🎉

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Ada Mar 10

@MsDropbear42 @lynfox Yep. If sharkey antenna were just a little bit more powerful, and if sharkey timelines could group parent posts and replies in a single pane, rather than sprinkling the conversation through a timeline (ie, do it like Friendica does), it would be perfect

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Droppie Mar 12

@ada @lynfox fwiw, for this morning's routine review of the last 24 hours posts in my #Geekery #antenna, there were NO false hits... 100% of the posts complied with my tags. this is very nice, albeit also confusing, given earlier misbehaviour.

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lynfox Mar 10

@MsDropbear42 @ada
Yes even before so much ai and vibe-coding these days the term efficient coding was becoming an oxymoron.
Although parsing language can be hard, especially English with it's long history of growing and morphing into something new every day.
At least you're not trying to distinguish punctuation. I once managed to seperate all the apostrophes from closing single quotes in a friends manuscript with lots of dialogue. The only way I could do it was by learning some regex! That's a special hell all of it's own. 👿

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Droppie Mar 10

@lynfox @ada 😱😂