Apologies for many posts today - I was excited after the #AtoZChallenge :) In any case, I also discovered another server I could log into & search for hashtags like #coins & #Numismatics & see a whole bunch of posts I never saw before. I really wish the Fediverse had a simple way of seeing EVERYTHING posted anywhere on Mastodon with a particular hashtag!
(@FediTips do you know, will me sharing posts help me see future posts from those servers, or do I actually have to follow those accounts?)
@FediTips Interestingly, some of those posts were on Mastodon.social, and I follow people on that server - so why wasn't I already seeing posts tagged with say #Coins from accounts on that server when I DO already follow people on that server?
@CoinOfNote
the posts won’t be distributed to our server unless somebody over here follows that account—we don’t automatically slurp up everything that gets posted on dot-social—so when you search a hashtag over here you only see posts that our server has seen @FediTips
@CoinOfNote
this is the tradeoff with choosing servers: we have a small, well-moderated server so we don’t see the trolls and Nazis and crypto scammers that they deal with on the big servers, but we also have less local searchable content
@tkinias All true, but it does make hashtags a lot less useful. This is exactly why people stay on Twitter - at least you know if you search the hashtag #Numismatics there (even though you can't follow it like here), you'll see EVERYTHING people post on that hashtag. There has to be a middle ground somewhere...
@tkinias I should also say, thank you for that clarification! I had previously thought that if someone on my server followed a user on XYZ server, then my server would now know about XYZ server and return things from there in searches etc. I must admit, I can't understand why things like that are so deliberately crippled on mastodon (in the architecture overall, not a specific server problem)
@CoinOfNote
I think the idea is that part of the point of decentralization is that each server doesn’t have to be able to handle the traffic of a million active users, and the way this is done is that the server only fetches posts from accounts that someone on the server follows. This makes it possible to run a nonprofit instance without a massive budget, but the downside is that it makes hashtag searching less useful.
@tkinias I do think it could be much more efficient without to much extra burden on servers - but I realized how I can make it work better for me: Follow all the accounts I find who might post numismatic content, eg all those I boosted yesterday, Use a list to show just a few of you I want to follow and the hashtags I follow. Then just double check that wider search (on all the other servers I can access) every now and then to see if there's anyone I'm missing. I think that should work well
Add comment