Think how much richer Internet searches will be with results from Lemmy, Beehaw, Kbin, etc
https://gadgeteer.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/RedditProhibited-400x400.png I have found search results to be very good with Reddit links in the past. I get that Reddit needs to pay for their hosting (just like everyone else) but with so many more Internet […]
https://gadgeteer.co.za/think-how-much-richer-internet-searches-will-be-with-results-from-lemmy-beehaw-kbin-etc/ https://squeet.me/display/962c3e10-8ab87d11-56eb80e6f33e9ed7
How do you figure search results will be richer?
It's a lot easier to index one standardized, centralized website than an undefined number of instances doing their own things and hosting content that's a mix of unique and redundant.
It seems much more challenging to make searching that have the same level of utility.
Ha, to me that strikes me not so much as Fediverse being better than users choosing to make Reddit worse, which is a different problem.
ActivityPub and http have very different design goals and so are designed very differently, especially in terms of push vs pull and resource usage.
Just to name one issue, ActivityPub is designed to protect scalability by trying to only send content to other instances that have actually shown interest in it ahead of time. So if my post is sent to your instance only, an indexer that's not already involved wouldn't even know the content exists to be indexed.
ActivityPub is only global in the sense that the English language is. Just because there are people all around the world speaking it doesn't mean they all hear a conversation I have in the coffee shop.
@volkris this is not about making Reddit worse, it is about adding the various ActivityPub based posts as well to the search results. I've tested on site searches and actually psots do show up on search, but they are not highlighted search results.
A person does see who they are following, or communities they are following. I'm not sure how Google does its indexing but for example posts from lemmy.ml were showing up.
@volkris it would be richer where already many of the Reddit sites have gone dark to search. So as comments and posts are being added to the Fediverse, those start to populate the search results.
I don't agree about "one standardised centralised site" as firstly searches are already indexing millions of copmpletely diufefrent sites, and secondly all the sites across the Fediverse do actually share one common protocol, namely ACtivityPub. So its not a matter of searching each site at all, just tapping into the global ASCtivityPub protocol that covers all those sites. It is the identical way that Twitter was being indexed, by tapping into its API.