Mike Macgirvin

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 07:15:31 +1000

I know this is controversial here, but as a journalist and writer, I really want global search on Mastodon -> “An upcoming patch for Mastodon, which is currently in the testing phase, will introduce federated cross-instance full text search” https://dotart.blog/dotart-blog/full-text-search-coming

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Anna Nicholson

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 08:45:02 +1000

@Richard MacManus @James Gleick I don’t want to make things harder for good journalists, so I am sympathetic

Journalists can still use the investigative skills they presumably employed before the likes of Google decided what information should be surfaced

And I don’t think it should necessarily be easy to trawl through years of postings by private citizens in particular – though Twitter, as was, gave many people the idea that that is a right

The fediverse also has the concept of local communities, and some servers allow local-only posts, which we certainly wouldn’t expect to be shared more widely

(People on Eugen’s instance – Richard included – probably don’t experience the same sense of community as people on smaller instances)

Martin Malý (aka @adent)

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 17:18:17 +1000

@Richard MacManus I love that nerdy vibes: We want own social network. We want privacy. We want to be discovered, but not indexed. We want to attract more people here, but we won't allow them to see what's here. And we want all of those things together!

shana

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 21:43:05 +1000

@Richard MacManus I'm not a journalist or writer, and I also want to be able to search and find worthy people and writings here. Now, there's two models that you can have in any information discovery system: a push model, where the system pushes to you a bunch of posts based on some aggregating logic, and a pull model, where you go out and seek and search and pull things. We're clearly a pull model here, but without search it's a self-defeating system, encouraging echo chambers and silos. It's unhealthy!

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