One of the biggest criticisms of Mastodon's technical capabilities involves how limited its search system is. With a new update, everything has changed.

It’s hard not to overstate how much of a big deal it is that Mastodon is adopting this kind of search functionality. Mastodon still makes up a vast portion of the Fediverse.

While other platforms have supported this for way longer, having buy-in by the biggest player in the space will probably have a huge effect on standard expectations moving forward.

  • Microw@lemm.ee
    30·
    1 year ago

    Let’s see how many servers actually implement ElastiSearch. It’s kinda resources-heavy.

    • Sean TilleyOPMEnglish
      18·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I feel like they’d probably get better mileage with something like Meilisearch, which is what Firefish uses for search.

    • cannotEnglish
      71·
      1 year ago

      It also adds to the deployment complexity even more. Just from memory, to run Mastodon you need:

      • any number of Rails web servers (horizontally scalable)
      • any number of Sidekiq worker processes (horizontally scalable)
      • a PostgreSQL database for persistent storage (vertically scalable modulo sharding)
      • a Redis server for caching and Sidekiq (vertically scalable modulo sharding)
      • a Elasticsearch server for full text search (vertically scalable modulo sharding)

      So this is at least 5 different server processes to manage, In reality for almost all deployments, Redis and Elasticsearch are unnecessary; the database can be used for jobs and full text search. Further, it could even be SQLite for all but large instances.

      The deployment story for Mastodon is a nightmare and a substitute like Pleroma or even better something in Rust is necessary.