Unable to find myself in search, advice? (reddthat.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by N3M@reddthat.com to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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I was having some issues finding myself in the search on other instances and wanted to see if I'm doing something wrong or if somebody has advice to fix it. Long story short, I'm a fan of Nostr so I'm usually on there. It's bridged to the fediverse, so that usually gives me my microblogging fix on both sides of the distributed micro blogging protocols but most servers have a hard time finding my account.

It's supposed to come up by searching @910af9070dfd6beee63f0d4aaac354b5da164d6bb23c9c876cdf524c7204e66d@mostr.pub or https://mostr.pub/users/npub1jy90jpcdl447ae3lp4924s65khdpvnttkg7fepmvmafycusyueksrvllx9

(Yes, it's abnormally long, cost of identifying an account with a key pair).

It comes up in some instances, but not most. Some instances defederate with the bridge, but on some instances I confirmed are federated with the bridge (and that show other mostr.pub accounts in the search) can't find mine.

I wrote it off as maybe the bridge being slow or janky, so I also created @nate0@nerdica.net (friendica). I figured I could throw on my blog incase anybody wanted to ping me or use it if I want to reply to anybody if their instance blocked the Mostr bridge. However, I seem to be having the same thing: on servers I know are federated with nerdica.net (and that show other nerdica.net accounts in the search) @nate0@nerdica.net still shows no results.

I made a few posts and let it sit for a while with no luck. Just wanted to check in and see if I'm doing something wrong that's perhaps obvious to everybody but me or something?

Thanks

Edit: the links above to my profile won't work on lemmy since it's expecting the profile at /u/ on Lemmy instead of the mastodon link structure. Others they're not broken and I can confirm they work sometimes.

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[-] freamon@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Lemmy instances won't search outside of their own databases if you're not logged in.

But if you are, what it does can be recreated on a command-line by doing:
curl --header 'accept: application/json' https://nerdica.net/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:nate0@nerdica.net | jq .

This shows that your profile is at https://nerdica.net/profile/nate0. Lemmy puts all users at a /u/, but using webfinger means that other fediverse accounts don't have to follow the same structure. For lemmy.world, you're at https://lemmy.world/u/nate0@nerdica.net in the same way that a mastodon user is at e.g https://lemmy.world/u/MrLovenstein@mastodon.social.

edit: ~~However if you webfinger your mostr.pub account, you get: {"error":"Invalid host"} so any ActivityPub instances will only ever be able to find you if you've interacted with them in some way to get a database entry. Edit: also, I tried to do this again, thought I'd try the npub1 account as well, but got Gateway Timeouts, so there's a bit of jankiness going on too.~~

[-] N3M@reddthat.com 1 points 9 months ago

I assume Lemmy and Mastodon are the same way in that they won't search outside their databases when logged out? If so that'd explain why. Thanks!

[-] freamon@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

I know for sure that Lemmy won't, it's likely the same for Mastodon.

I was wrong about not being able to WebFinger your account - I still had the @ at the beginning when I trying. Doing it properly:

curl --header 'accept: application/json' https://mostr.pub/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:910af9070dfd6beee63f0d4aaac354b5da164d6bb23c9c876cdf524c7204e66d@mostr.pub | jq .

gets the right response.

However, I'm logged into lemmy.world and it still couldn't get your account. At a guess, it's because there's a 20 character limit on usernames.