this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
203 points (97.2% liked)
Fediverse
40827 readers
743 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Interesting read, but boy does this journalist have a ... different read on things than I do.
IMO it's the exact opposite; we talk about this because we want the best protocol to win, this time, while knowing full well that usually it doesn't.
My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be "broken" (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.
I doubt that trump supporters cheering on the USA throwing their weight around like the world's bully-in-chief would be receptive to such a message.
I can't tell if I'm just too deep in the fedi-culture weeds, or if the article really is confidently ignorant.
Honestly, I couldn't give a shit. Like I couldn't give a shit about celebrities and journalists signing up to Mastodon.
The Fediverse with which I interact is vibrant, and full of (mostly) good people, all sharing knowledge, jokes, art, etc... I don't personally care if Taylor Swift signs up, because the people who currently live on here largely play by the rules, and the vibe is good.
I don't care if Bluesky's protocol ends up 'winning', because it doesn't affect Mastodon. Or Lemmy. Or Pixelfed. Or Peertube. Or whatever federated services anyone else uses.
Yeah, remember these are the folk moving from Florida to Alaska with nothing but a knife and a Canadian tuxedo and being surprised when they die after two weeks.
Well it's a bit more complicated. A really significant reason search isn't that comprehensive even on a big instance like mastodon.social is that Mastodon prioritizes privacy and has made it optional to be included in the search results with mastodon.social also opting to make it disabled by default when they added it.
A second problem is that if you're on a smaller instance you may not be seeing enough posts because they don't propagate there. This also affects hashtags. There's projects like Holos Discover fediverse search engine and Fediscovery that are addressing this problem but they won't change the fact that many users simply have indexing their posts for full text search disabled.
Prolly both :D
Search is broken beyond the choice of being an opt-in. The fact that there's no way to sort search in any way except chronological order means it's hard to find anything relevant. Instead it's usually just a bunch of spam blogs or replies