Tootfinder
Feb 09, 2023
One of the less popular (but to many, important) design decision made by Mastodon was to support only a hashtag search, not a full-text search. There were good reasons for this - doing a full-text search on a federated system can be nightmarish (we had long arguments about this back in the days of eduSource). To make full-text search you really need an aggregator (which is what Google is, essentially) or to house all your content on a single site (which is what Twitter does). But aggregation goes against the spirit of Mastodon, which was created with the intent of creating a space where you're not creating content for the entire world to consume. Enter Tootfinder, "Proof of concept of an opt-in global Mastodon search." Now it's not full aggregation (posts are removed from the index after 14 days, and it uses the API to read posts from accounts it follows, instead of the much lighter RSS). I'm not sure I'm even interested in a full-text search for Mastodon. Via Peter Suber.
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