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I'm Starting A Search Engine For The Fediverse (lemmy.ca)

submitted 11 months ago by lautan@lemmy.ca to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Hey everyone,

This isn't an announcement, just wanted peoples thoughts on this.

I think everyone knows searching the fediverse can be better. Googling doesn't work too well, etc. So I wanted to do my part and help out.

Indexing all posts, etc is quite a lot to handle, so I wanted to start small and just focus on video search. I've started indexing videos from Peertube and other video websites. (Even YouTube but this could be removed to just focus on independent sites)

I know Peertube has their own search engine for videos. I will be reaching out to them. Compared to my site I'm planning it'll have other video sources and be easier to use.

So that leads to feedback from you guys.

What do you think about indexing videos posted on the fediverse and other independent platforms?
Are there similar services?
Am I just wasting my time?

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[-] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 32 points 11 months ago

I found FediSearch, and also this post basically saying that a fediverse search engine would just be used as a tool by trolls.

[-] lautan@lemmy.ca 9 points 11 months ago

That’s a good point. But those people can be banned? I guess Reddit handles this by moderation and archiving old posts.

[-] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 4 points 11 months ago

Yes, but moderation teams on the fediverse are very small, and by nature of it, can make hundreds of account of different servers all trailing that would need to be individually sought out and banned.

It is a game of cat & 100 mice

[-] gabe@literature.cafe 1 points 11 months ago

People will take the harassment off site especially if they are dedicated enough or use it to scrape for potential personal info to publicly release.

[-] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago

How is that different from Reddit? If trolls want to search and scrape and find information on people, they're going to. You can't put your information on the open Internet and not appreciate there's always a danger of that.

[-] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social -2 points 11 months ago

There is more effort barrier if the trolls have to do all the scraping and sorting themselves than just popping a term that is a right wing lightning rod into search and getting a list of targets.