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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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[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 39 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I disagree. Post privacy sure, but the internet is by definition public. Anything you put out there can be used for pretty much everything, the original rules of the internet apply. I'd be happy to see an easy opt out on the engine to remove yourself, but if everything is opt in it'll never get off the ground.

[-] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 3 points 11 months ago

As the fediverse is almost exclusively run by volunteers that are paying server bills and being admins, I could see some larger instances not taking kindly to this, especially depending on how much stress it would be putting on some already at capacity servers.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 18 points 11 months ago

Ideally, OP's crawlers will just come from their own instance that other instance owners can defederate from if they want to opt out.

[-] lautan@lemmy.ca 14 points 11 months ago

Yeah that would be the case.

[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 5 points 11 months ago

That's a good idea. Listen to public data being broadcasted out, then you aren't worrying people with scraping or anything. It would only be from go live onward, but you would just be listening to the protocol.

[-] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 1 points 11 months ago

For that to happen on an instance organically users would need to visit all these instances/communities. To speed that up you would need a bot to do all.that "seeding" for you. That brings you full circle to the server resources on bigger instances.

This seems like an opt-in, not an opt-out activity.