"Mastodon doesn't have a search tool."
It has a search tool. ElasticSearch. Lets you search your own posts, any mentions you've received, anything you've favorited or bookmarked.
"No, I want it to have a more robust search tool."
Well, we're adding a search tool to Mastodon that will let you search everything your site is federated with.
"That's not enough, I want to search everything"
So you want to search every server, even servers which you might not be federated with, you want to do a lookup against all their content and do you have any idea how much data that is?
Like even when we're all given the magical "everything" search we keep expecting from our days of searching a single database for all the tweets that exist it's not going to work the way you want because of the tech involved, and because--primarily--NO ONE HAS ALL THE DATA.
Oliphant Is Completely Fine /
npub18d…08982
2023-03-22 15:15:19
Author Public Key
npub18dz0l4nmhusj90pcjy4uwfm4qnjvzkwa3jrjptgqv32ldckadxgqs08982Published at
2023-03-22 15:15:19Event JSON
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"content": "\"Mastodon doesn't have a search tool.\"\n\nIt has a search tool. ElasticSearch. Lets you search your own posts, any mentions you've received, anything you've favorited or bookmarked.\n\n\"No, I want it to have a more robust search tool.\"\n\nWell, we're adding a search tool to Mastodon that will let you search everything your site is federated with.\n\n\"That's not enough, I want to search everything\"\n\nSo you want to search every server, even servers which you might not be federated with, you want to do a lookup against all their content and do you have any idea how much data that is?\n\nLike even when we're all given the magical \"everything\" search we keep expecting from our days of searching a single database for all the tweets that exist it's not going to work the way you want because of the tech involved, and because--primarily--NO ONE HAS ALL THE DATA.",
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