pleroma, mastodon, and other AP microblogging service has the same problem. you have to specifically use the url or @ to find someone or a post. The search feature isn’t really one at all. you can’t discover anything or anyone who hasn’t federated to that instance, and there is hundreds of instances around at this point.
Fediverse platforms is great for small niche communities. but it still lacks the basic feature needed for it to become truly a Social Networks replacement. because of the disconnected nature. I could say It’s impossible for you to discover something without going to other corporate platforms. there’s no such thing as finding interesting creators on the fediverse.
Any solutions?
The complete way to fix discoverability problem.
There are 3 conditions for this to work.
- every user has to assign which interests they are interested in. (in a prompt or/and in the user settings)
- (Only public users) user information are put on a list in the instance local repository so foreign instances can access it.
- Instance owners has to be told (optionally) to register on https://the-federation.info/ in the installation process.
Image description; Instances will make user information available publicly in their respective local repositories. then by reading the instances list from https://the-federation.info/ , Instances can pull in user information by downloading it from other instances.
(to minimize storage/data usage, we’ll only download the user information and interests, and not the posts and bio. this will not federate until user follow them like normal. add an option to download the information less recurrently, if it ever gets too big.)
Assigning interests will help people find someone to follow with a system rather than an intrusive algorithm. features like recommending someone to follow someone from certain topics, and an improved search result can be added from this.
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/16168
For Creators
create a list of creators and interesting figures, (Artists, Musicians, Writers, Video-Creators, and more) and put it on a repository for instances to pull in. (the platforms has to support pulling in the search result from a repository list.)
Fediverse Creators Wiki
I created a github repository called fediverse-creators-wiki, when the devs decided to do add this feature. I’ll make a compatible list for fediverse platforms so they can use this repository.
Contribute; https://github.com/gwynne0190/fediverse-creators-wiki
thanks for the feedback @dreeg_ocedam@lemmy.ml, It’s updated.
I had a similar idea at first but I thought non-creators usually don’t want to be found and be private. though just a wiki is not a solution for wide-search. I created this because people want to find creators most of the time instead of just people. other than Artists, Bloggers, Writers, and Journalist and important figures, there’s just people who has little involvement in the internet.
Mastodon gives you quite a lot of granularity over what is and isn’t public on your account. I think that people that don’t want to be found already have the the option not to be.
There is no clear way to distinguish who want to be found and who doesn’t want to, and I personally believe that people that don’t want their stuff to be found shouldn’t make their posts public.
You have a point. They can do what peertube does as @dragonX@lemmy.ml said. or maybe instances can download the search result recurrently to reduce slowdowns.
there is already https://communitywiki.org/trunk which is a tool to follow people based on interest, thought It’s not much of a wiki than is it just a tool to follow. this one however doesn’t exist yet.