Another day, another utter lack of activity on here. Even searching under hashtags that might even notionally, possibly yield interesting content shows activity rates barely above flatline. One, two posts in the past week at most. Zero for months on end.
The #fediverse is a great place to talk about the fediverse and...well, not much else I guess?
@ouij what kind of content are you searching for? I am interested in obscure tech-related topics, and get so much content I can't read through it all.
@ramin_hal9001 baseball. Football. Music. Gaming. Film. Television.
You know, relatively boring, normal, non-technical topics.
The mastodon/fediverse user population loves to talk about how diverse it is but it still seems like 98% tech guys
@ramin_hal9001 like the obscure tech is cool, but the vibe is extremely “decentralized LinkedIn equivalent for nerds”
@ouij ah, yeah. I think you're right about that. It is largely tech people.
I am surprised you can't find much about film or TV though, I see lots of talk about film and TV here, and not just the nerdy stuff either. Maybe it just isn't hash-tagged very well.
@ramin_hal9001 the protocol is so beautifully designed it is impossible to find anything. I’m sure it fulfills some great technical dream or something. But for the user that isn’t invested in the idea of the fediverse it feels like an actively hostile design. A social network built for people that want to tell you to fuck off, lol
IMO, I gripe that the protocol is not beautifully designed at all :)
Setting that aside, though, generally when you search for a hashtag through your home account/instance, the instance doesn’t search all of fediverse for it, but only searches through the limited number of posts that have happened to be shared to that one instance that you’re on.
That really limits the horizon of content that is available for it to show you, but it’s how the system was designed to function.
To put it a different way, each instance only subscribes to feeds that its users have expressed interest in, and so each can only sort through posts in those limited feeds. That’s what you’re seeing, the window that your particular instance has on the larger network.
@volkris
> "Setting that aside, though, generally when you search for a hashtag through your home account/instance, the instance doesn't search all of fediverse for it, but only searches through the limited number of posts that have happened to be shared to that one instance that you're on."
The protocol is limited, but I can't think of a better way to do it without greatly increasing the amount of computing resources each instance would have to devote to search functionality — the number of search requests would quickly make it untenable for most small instances to run anymore. The engineering trade-off made on the ActivityPub protocol is to trade being cheap and lightweight over providing reliable network-wide search.
Only large instances with lots of computing power can provide search, which any instance is allowed to do if they can afford it. But most instances do not since it is so expensive, both in terms of computational power and actual operational costs.