One of the biggest criticisms of Mastodon's technical capabilities involves how limited its search system is. With a new update, everything has changed.
About time. I’ve been using well-federated Firefish instances to do my searching because that platform supports that feature, but now I won’t have to anymore.
anyone remember when it was intentional that search wasn’t a thing and people defederated from instances that catalogued other instances’ posts for search? just me?
That was about indexing without people’s permission. This new system is opt-in so if you don’t grant access in your settings, your posts won’t get included.
If someone wants the ability to control how their data is used, it should be their right.
Who gets to survey the data? There are companies and governments who stand to profit of our existence being thrown into their machines.
There is a violence in that I still haven’t figured out how to describe, but people lose their lives over this stuff. That should be enough to warrant such a right
I never said people shouldn’t have that right, i was just genuinely wondering why it’s important to people. Thanks for the insight, definitely good points you make. :)
But somehow I think, if a big company wants to scrape that data (thats still publicly available, whether you make it natively searchable or not) they can do it anyway. So if you’re worried about that, shouldn’t you rather just not post that stuff to the public?
(I want to emphasise again that I’m not trying to argue against you, I just want to understand as I’m not that well versed on these topics)
So if you’re worried about that, shouldn’t you rather just not post that stuff to the public?
To me this feels like the same logic as “If you have nothing to hide, why do you care?”
I mean, you’re right, people shouldn’t post stuff publicly if they truly don’t want it to be indexed, but that doesn’t mean that whatever we want to say or do publicly can’t be used against us in some way even if we think that what we say and do is ok. Like existing while being queer online, for instance
Not hard at all actually! Their docs are really well done, and I believe someone has recently made an Ansible playbook if that’s more your style as well (though I can’t endorse it since I haven’t tried it yet).
The hard part isn’t setting up an instance. The hard part is getting it well-federated. If it’s not well-federated then you’re going to be in a party on your own. If you have a fairly large follow list (about 3-5k) it may be better, but overall it’ll be a bad experience.
I admittedly don’t follow mastodon development much but wonder if there are plans to allow switching it out. I know firefish allows meilisearch which I’ve read is far more efficient
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
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About time. I’ve been using well-federated Firefish instances to do my searching because that platform supports that feature, but now I won’t have to anymore.
anyone remember when it was intentional that search wasn’t a thing and people defederated from instances that catalogued other instances’ posts for search? just me?
That was about indexing without people’s permission. This new system is opt-in so if you don’t grant access in your settings, your posts won’t get included.
That’s fantastic news, glad to hear it
Genuine question: why would people have a problem with making stuff you post publicly searchable?
If someone wants the ability to control how their data is used, it should be their right.
Who gets to survey the data? There are companies and governments who stand to profit of our existence being thrown into their machines.
There is a violence in that I still haven’t figured out how to describe, but people lose their lives over this stuff. That should be enough to warrant such a right
I never said people shouldn’t have that right, i was just genuinely wondering why it’s important to people. Thanks for the insight, definitely good points you make. :) But somehow I think, if a big company wants to scrape that data (thats still publicly available, whether you make it natively searchable or not) they can do it anyway. So if you’re worried about that, shouldn’t you rather just not post that stuff to the public? (I want to emphasise again that I’m not trying to argue against you, I just want to understand as I’m not that well versed on these topics)
It’s all good
To me this feels like the same logic as “If you have nothing to hide, why do you care?”
I mean, you’re right, people shouldn’t post stuff publicly if they truly don’t want it to be indexed, but that doesn’t mean that whatever we want to say or do publicly can’t be used against us in some way even if we think that what we say and do is ok. Like existing while being queer online, for instance
It’s pretty nice. My instance, ohai.social, implemented it already and it’s certainly convenient.
Thats so cool. How hard is to setup an instance? Like to i have to buy an actual server?
Not hard at all actually! Their docs are really well done, and I believe someone has recently made an Ansible playbook if that’s more your style as well (though I can’t endorse it since I haven’t tried it yet).
The hard part isn’t setting up an instance. The hard part is getting it well-federated. If it’s not well-federated then you’re going to be in a party on your own. If you have a fairly large follow list (about 3-5k) it may be better, but overall it’ll be a bad experience.
Sorry, when I say mine, I mean the one I signed up for, not the one I run
Elestisearch is an interesting choice to stick with. Mastodon is already a resource hog as it is.
I admittedly don’t follow mastodon development much but wonder if there are plans to allow switching it out. I know firefish allows meilisearch which I’ve read is far more efficient
Well, what else are you gonna do? ES is proven and battle tested.