How to Search Content on Lemmy? (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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In the past, when searching on a search engine, I would use "site:reddit.com" to narrow down my results. However, with Lemmy having different instances that may contain varying content, I found myself unsure of how to approach searching effectively. While the Lemmy search feature is useful at times, I sometimes miss the convenience of using a dedicated search engine. To address this, I developed a script that formats the most popular instances and allows me to search within them. Nevertheless, I wonder if there is a more convenient method for accomplishing this task. If anyone has any suggestions or tips, I would greatly appreciate it.

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[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

An ideal search engine for this sort of thing will look different from a generic web search engine.

This would actually be a pretty good opportunity for a new search project: indexing fediverse information and making it (as the saying goes) universally accessible & useful.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

If there was an instance well populated that didn't block or get block by other instances that would be enough, because it would copy the content from every other instance, but that doesn't seem likely.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

ActivityPub doesn't have a flood-fill model like NNTP, though. Until instance A has a user that's subscribed to a community on instance B, instance A doesn't know about that community and maybe not even that instance.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's why the instance needs to be well-populated, so there are more chances of the content being replicated. However, the more users there are, the more likely someone gets annoyed and decides to defederate from them.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For the first several years of this service existing, expect a lot of friction as people who run instances figure out how to accomplish the goals that brought them to this service. That's normal. If it seems odd, go look at the history of IRC!

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I would love to read more about this. Do you happen to have any good resources I could read into?

[-] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm not sure if there's a definitive history, but the Wikipedia articles on various IRC networks are a start, e.g. EFNet, DALnet, etc. The latter was the first IRC network to introduce network-wide authentication, for instance, which is a feature folks have been talking about here too.