also just as a thing, in general 'you shouldnt impliment this because it isnt the platonic ideal of <thing>' doesnt actually fly.
no im not talking about the not-quite-almost-ok privacy stuff, i mean... christ so many features that people say cant even be worked on because any solutions that can be done wont be absolutely perfect
@Elizafox federated search is different, as is a lot of things, because bandwidth requirements are absurd from masto being done the way it is
@Elizafox the way i can see search done is by someone *hosting the search thing* or a cluster of them that work together, because otherwise a lot of the effort is duplicated
@Elizafox but 'effort duplication' is basically half this project so shrug
@nire The thing is a lot of admins want to opt out of search so that really sucks. =I
I've heard things like "you don't really want search" like wtf don't tell me what I want.
@Elizafox opting out of search on an individual level would be nice. admins... let users decide? maybe make it default off. but like, its a useful function? especially now, when people want to find like, stuff people have said about dev
@Elizafox er, make a toggle to make it default off for your instance
@nire Yeah.
The thing about federated search btw is each search query would expand outwards to each server and it's gonna be really load intensive and eat shit tons of bandwidth/CPU. It just doesn't scale.
@Elizafox and, hah, half the servers cant even handle you following more than one person every ten seconds, as i figured out manually following 200 people one day
@nire My best solution for search actually:
Search locally and allow searches to other servers individually at a time.
There's also token bucket limiting for queries (both outgoing and incoming) but that's a shitty hack and one of the least user-friendly things about reddit too.
Seriously, "search before asking" well wtf search is BROKEN half hte fucking time.
@Elizafox or just restrict it to narrowed searches.
@Elizafox 'you need no less than three parameters' :P
@Elizafox idk is google indexing these with any regularity yet? lemmie check
@Elizafox nope its completely random and a very poor sampling so you cant use that :P
@Elizafox like, posts can get out of order but you notice w/ follows or searches
like, so many things -- privacy, DM stuff, a sort of extended local, friends of friends, etc etc. doing things that federate *only to masto*.
cant currently do them perfectly in the way other things want, so might as well never amirite
@nire there's are some naysayers on the non-Masto side of the fence who complain that Mastodon is bad because this has already happened with some features, rather than investigating why people want or need those features and trying to come to solutions that would benefit GS, Friends etc as well and I find that attitude infuriating
@nire Friendica I mean
@nire "if you don't like it, why don't you go make your own"
"no not like that"
@nire caps from instances would help, so say you won't federate private posts if the instance doesn't signal it supports that.
@nire also some questionable knowledge of the protocol being implemented (or dishonest leadership, but never first assume malice) going on? I probed the tiniest bit about selective federation and got this resulting thread lol https://icosahedron.website/users/shel/updates/40142
@nire I've been thinking about things like federated search and stuff.
The problem is literally thousands of requests for each search...