It feels like people are 50%/50% on the search feature on Mastodon and Fediverse in general. Some Fedi software have quite extensive search implemented already in my knowledge. Mastodon barely has any search if you don't count the open text search patch.
@rolle I might get in trouble for saying this, but there is a 90% chance that improved search (with public posts) will be in 4.2.0 final. PR (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/26344) is almost ready and we want to deploy is on m.s ASAP to get some feedback, and include it in beta 2.
@fluffgar@rolle Eugen commented “I've change the default query operator from OR to AND (this renders the + prefix obsolete, though)”, so I assume you can do it?
But I am not familiar with this PR very much so I cant say for sure.
@renchap@fluffgar@rolle my read of this PR is that it doesn't change existing behavior that treats hashtags and text identically when matching search terms (since most punctuation is ignored).
so searching for "foo bar", "#foo bar", "foo #bar", or "#foo#bar" would produce identical results: they would return posts that have both "foo" and "bar" in the text, whether they are present as tags or as bare words.
@renchap@fluffgar@rolle it's worth noting an obscure Mastodon API feature for this exact use case. unrelated to the search system, and not exposed by any client UI i've ever seen, it's possible to do limited boolean filtering of tags using tag timelines:
(the problem with that implementation is that it won't match tags that are attached to the post but not part of the post text. maybe a future iteration will pull in tag names from Status.statuses_tags.)
@vyr@rolle@fluffgar I suggested having the hashtags in a separate field, and when you search for ‘#something’ it looks into this field. But also have it in the text, minus the “#" symbol, so it can be found when searching for 'something’.
I dont know if this will make it into the final version
@renchap Thanks for the update on search. It will be great to have an opt-in search mechanism, something that people have wanted for years, but I strongly suggest not deploying the PR on .social until the issue about chaining the meaning of the "discoverability" flag is addressed.
Deploying the PR in its current non-consensual form on .social would be seen as a breach of trust in even the best of circumstances, and since we've just had a high-profile example of a guy using non-consensual search to harass somebody it's an especially volatile time right now.
@jdp23 Please, avoid spamming people about this issue. We have read the comments, issues, threads, DMs and every other way people are using, and this is hard to handle.
I am not one of the people making decisions on this (or even working on this…), but changes will be made to the PR, most probably with a dedicated flag to allow search.
@renchap thanks for the response, and glad to hear a dedicated flag to allow search is likely.
And while I don't think that replying to somebody who's posted about this is spamming, I can certainly see that the amount of feedback you're getting on this and other changes catching people by surprise is hard to handle. So in addition to changing the PR, another good outcome will be if the team and mastodon.social become more proactive about communicating potential major changes like this much earlier going forward.
@jdp23 I agree, and I am working on several improvement proposals on this regard.
But please note that the team is very under-water, improving processes is needed, but many people are also asking for features, there are a lot of maintenance to be done (bug fixes, improvement, performance, scalability, security…) and every choice that is made generates a lot of debate, sometime very… vehement.
This is a very hard environment to work in (and especially for me as I am not paid at the moment).
@rolle wish I saw this earlier. I understand the desire for folks to remain under the radar, but from my use case I would love more exposure, as well as far easier abilities to find content and people.
@rolle it seems weird when people join a social network and go “I don’t want people to find me or see what I write except the exactly specific people I want”.
Then make a private discord / irc / telegram group for your friends?
How are new people supposed to make connections and share things?
@rolle Quality full-text search is less divisive than people think. It's just that those who are opposed are really, really opposed and very vocal.
The rest of us just want Mastodon to have feature parity with the access that Google already has. Mastodon needs to grow, and it's a step towards broadening the diversity of voices on the platform.
@rolle IMO it’s at least questionable to make this a „democratic decision“. Most arguments against global full text search circle around the protection of minorities. Minorities are, by nature, in the minority. Does that mean we should not protect them?
@rolle Instances should have controls on what is permitted. An admin should be able to enable or disable remote full text search, as well as features like quote messaging.
@rolle What makes sense to me is searching in the current context. Search in Home, search in Local, search in Federated, search in current list. Search in all of the Fediverse for any matching public post would return too much to be useful and difficult or impossible to achieve.
I can set “language”, “content warnung”, “for all/only mentionend/DM” individually for every toot i write with my app. Why not add another button “searchable/not searchable” to the edit page?
It us probably because english is not my native language, but what i wanted to say:
Apart from the binary option to have all toots searchable or have no toot searchable. Have an option to decide for every single individual public toot to make this toot searchable via a search function or not.
@rolle
not enough subtlety in the dichotomy, as others are saying - eg. people who don't want to be indexed should be able to public post, ppl with private profiles, and so on. it doesn't have to be all public posts or nothing and I don't find the dichotomy all that helpful when the question is really "what controls would make search safe and acceptable s.t. it can be tailored to instance needs"
@rolle
so this is also a longstanding problem with post visibility. too much is bound up in a single setting. ideally it would mean just intention for visibility, but it has overlapping function for ppl with public profiles (eg. not spamming the local feed) and for ppl with private profiles (above). need a more subtle way of negotiating those boundaries, both from the visibility setting side and the indexing side.
@rolle the general history of search discussions on Mastodon is that people want something consensual, aka opt-in. So it would be great to see that as an option in the poll. See Anil's post at https://www.anildash.com/2023/01/16/a-fediverse-search/
@jdp23 @rolle
yeah totally, your comment is right on. not sure why the proposed update creates yet another unnecessarily combined setting rather than just making a separate setting for search indexing
@rolle I wish there was a real search. I miss some of the non-geek topics that are harder to find on here because people just don’t naturally use hashtags anymore.
@rolle I've never managed to use it in my docker-compose.yml. The tootctl search deploy step never worked. I opened an issue (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/25392), but nothing since, so I gave up on that. Yeah it was probably a resource-related problem, as I don't have many.
@manu I run Mastodon without docker, but ES needs a lot of RAM, at least 8 gigs. It's a resource hog as java applications often are. I run it on a separate more powerful server because of this.
@quiri The current patch with extended search works just like that. On top of it, if the person has unticked "Allow your account to be discovered by strangers through recommendations, trends and other features", then nothing is found from that person.
Well I wouldn't want to be THAT incognito. I just think that what I said 6 months ago is nothing so important that it needs to be found by people who didn't connect with me, or example.
@rolle my problem is the keyword search, I can't even retrieve my own public post because there is not a search sintax like from:username to search only in the post of a specific user.
@mpjgregoire Discoverability, indexing, profile and post visibility are currently all opt-out. I think due to the nature of social media it should be social, not hidden by default. @gubi
@rolle Many of those features are only Mastodon to Mastodon features not federated when you go outside the Mastodon API and interact with other fediverse software through ActivityPub alone. Something that gets missed all the time by folks who have never ventured outside the Mastoverse. Google doesn't care about your #noindex tag when it scrapes the fediverse and the Misskey forks, et al generally don't know what it means. @mpjgregoire@gubi
@rolle@mpjgregoire concerning discoverability, without a search syntax for queries my contents are very difficult and sometimes impossible to discovery even for me…
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