this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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That was a big complaint during the 2022 migration. And it's something that's basically available on every fediverse platform not called Mastodon. I wish that fact had caused more people to actually check out those platforms, rather than further entrench Mastodon as the core of the fediverse.
The problem I ran into is that every single platform that primarily interacted with Mastodon (The keys, etc.) had the same exact same set of problems.
While yes, my Firefish instance had search, what was it searching? Local data only, and once I figured out that Mastodon-style replies didn't federate to all of someone's followers, it became pretty clear that it was uh, not very useful.
You can search, but any given server may or may not have access to data you actually want and thus, well, you just plain cannot meaningfully search for shit unless you go to one of the mega instances, or join giant piles of relays and store gigabyte upon gigabyte upon gigabyte of garbage data you do not care about.
The whole implementation is kinda garbage for search-based discovery from it's very basic design all the way through to everyone's implementations.
Search will never search non-local content. That's not how search works anywhere. Even Google is searching local content.
That's what search engine spiders do. They create local profiles of websites that end up being sorted and searched.
We have to give up on the idea of having easy and direct access to the whole of thw fediverse. Fefiverse sites don't even know about every other fediverse site, and they never will.
Which is the point I'm trying to make: right now, you cannot use search as a discoverability medium, unless you're on something the scale of mastodon.social.
Search with a focus on new content discoverability is utterly useless for smaller or single user instances, because a search that only finds things you already know about isn't exactly a useful search for discoverability.
If I have to be on the biggest instances, then there's very little difference between something like Bluesky and Mastodon in terms of usability, and uh, I might as well pick the one that's more likely to have the most growth and diversity of content.
I agree, and it's why I've pretty much migrated back to centralized services with the exception of Lemmy, because Lemmy works very well in terms of finding useful shit to follow in a way that literally no other federated platform does.