Ask HN: Should Mastodon have global search?

5 points

4 years ago

This was brought up in the NormConf Slack the other day. There, an article was mentioned about the cultural reasons why Mastodon’s search works the way it does (https://midrange.tedium.co/issues/how-mastodon-search-works/).

TL;DR Mastodon is a reaction to Twitter and has different norms for engagement. Maybe global search is incompatible with that.

As an experiment I implemented a simple Google CSE that uses a domain list of all known English Mastodon instances as listed on https://instances.social but it doesn’t seem to work very well: https://searchmastodon.social

What does HN think?

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