Out of interest, what is search like on Piefed? Lemmy’s is all but useless. Even filtering by "last week" will show me two year-old posts and comments, regularly that don’t actually include the word I’m looking for.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 4 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

Searching by "posts" on Lemmy is actually superior to searching on PieFed, though searching by "all" or "comments" on Lemmy is absolutely borken (haha misspelled unintentionally but Imma just leave it there as it fits so well!?:-P). Reputedly Lemmy's search is about to add the ability to filter on post "titles" separately from the rest of the text, which sounds very nice.

So it's hit or miss what works or not on Lemmy. PieFed's search is the singular feature that is currently very behind compared to Lemmy, but like everything else I expect PieFed to rapidly overtake Lemmy one day soon-ish. Therefore I use a PieFed account as my daily main, but when I want to search for something I still switch back to Lemmy (you don't even need an account for that though).

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Searching by “posts” on Lemmy is actually superior to searching on PieFed, though searching by “all” or “comments” on Lemmy is absolutely borken

Ah, that makes sense. I'll try to pay attention to which I'm doing, because my most recent search used only comments, but was absolutely useless.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah anything that involves comments doesn't work so well - either them specifically or the combination of them and posts. And tbf it does retrieve the results of the query, it is only the sort options that fail miserably.

I've used Lemmy now for >2 years and the excuse that "it's still in development" has very much worn thin when no changes at all have been made to this or so many other issues with it.

At least the search function is still better than Reddit's! (Obligatory and reflexive fuck spex:-P)

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

At least the search function is still better than Reddit’s

I actually don't agree. This is one area where Reddit's centralised nature is a benefit, because it makes it super easy for Google to index and return results. On-site search isn't great on Reddit, but at least Googling for stuff from Reddit works really well.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

Yes I meant the on-site one developed by Reddit, but agreed that the centralized nature lends itself towards searching by Google.

Although the other way opens up a huge can of worms since every large, general-purpose instance will - due to the nature of how the ActivityPub protocol works - have basically all of the content of the entire Threadiverse. Or as near to that as it works for a first approximation anyway, e.g. someone deciding to index all content appearing on "Lemmy.World" would get all the memes, movie discussions, etc., missing chiefly things like piracy and anarchy and other things that LW has decided to ban. It won't be "correct" in the sense of attribution to the OP, but once someone found their way to the content housed on LW they are but a click away from getting to its original source anyway. So from that standpoint, Google indexing I would naively have thought would not be all that difficult? Except for the increasingly niche content that isn't federated with the largest instances, which is perhaps desirable anyway to not expose mainstream normies to content calling for e.g. actual murder in response to world events (such as occurs routinely on e.g. Hexbear).

A safer, sanitized version of the Threadiverse that is searchable by anyone works to all of our advantage, I would believe?

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (5 replies)

load more comments (18 replies)