This article is on Medium, which has a paywall. I’m a member, but not logged in. I was able to read it so it may depend on how many times you’ve read Medium articles.
One point he made that I found interesting was:
So, in light of all of this, should Reddit even exist? Is there really a point to a web forum in 2023? Aren’t we past all that?
He thinks we are. I never thought about it before. Maybe in the case of some Reddit subreddits and other forums, but I don’t think so in general. I’ve got a lot great information from forums.
Sounds like an opportunity to develop a fediverse focused search engine
Does ActivityPub have search protocols? Seems like something worth having built in
My guess is no. ActivityPub is more a way for different servers and services to communicate with each other. To run a search query you typically need to build up an index of different documents.
You might have search abilities on a single server/instance since all local posts would be indexable on that server. But if you want to index all servers, then that sounds like something for a new service. You’d have to crawl all the posts on all the servers, index them and weight them. Basically Google for fediverse.
@CosmicApe Many users feel wary about their posts being searchable.
That’s definitely a fair point that I hadn’t considered. I feel that posts not being searchable should be default for certain communities, but having easy search for things like tech support and product reviews like Reddit did would be a huge help with growing the platform.
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