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I created a site that helps people search the fediverse
(programmer2514.github.io)
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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Fediverse
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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
founded 1 year ago
Hm, I find it somewhat annoying that right now, this is not really searching the Fediverse, but rather what we've come to call "the Threadiverse", which is all about Reddit-like content aggregators.
In other words, I'd love an option to search different kinds of content, like instead of Threadiverse-stuff searching the most popular mastodon, misskey, or pleroma instances just to name a few.
Searching Mastodon is a bit of a.... contentious issue. A lot of smaller Mastodon-based sites are full of traumatized vulnerable people who really just want to do their own thing, and they'll rattle cages if they find out someone's indexing their sites or posts. If anyone's making third party search tools, it's best to be careful to respect discoverability and indexing flags.
I find this to be incredibly fair, but also makes it much harder to dive into the fediverse. Where is the middle ground do you think?
Mastodon has flags for opting in to discoverability features (being featured in the profile directory, and having posts be searchable via Mastodon's search bar) and for search engine indexing (for Google, bing, etc.).
Just don't return posts from users that have opted out of those, and things should be mostly ok.
This is the main problem I see. User settings are part of the mastodon API. If you're building a general-purpose search engine, you use a crawler to index pages and your crawler has no idea those flags even exist.
I'm hoping to expand the project to hopefully be a bit more robust - I'll definitely keep this on my radar
Thank you so much for the consideration! <3