this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

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Announcing a new Search Engine for Lemmy (www.search-lemmy.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
153 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I shared bits and pieces of this before, but it's officially up and running now: https://www.search-lemmy.com/

This is an enhanced search engine for Lemmy. With a few primary goals:

  • You can choose a preferred instance. After choosing what your primary instance is, and performing a search ALL links will open in that instance.
  • This aims to be a replacement for using site:reddit.com in Google, but just for the fediverse.
  • You can filter the search results by:
    • Instance -- This will filter the results to only show communities that belong to a particular instance. Just type something like instance:lemmy.wrold or instance:https://lemmy.world/. This is separate from your preferred instance, such that you can search for posts on lemmy.world while still opening them on lemmy.ml.
    • Community -- You can refine the search by a specific community. You use the same syntax that you'd use here community:[[email protected]](/c/[email protected]).
    • Author -- Similar to the above you can also filter by a specific author such as: author:@[email protected].
  • The entire thing is open-source. You can view the code and even host your own instance... See more details here: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search.

NOTE: This only supports Lemmy instances for now. Other fediverse type instances may be in the future depending on how this works out.

I've been working on this over just the last few weeks, so it hasn't had a chance to crawl much of the fediverse yet. For now it only supports lemmy.world and lemmy.ml but other preferred-instances will come online as time goes by.

If anyone finds any bugs, and I'm sure you will, or if anyone has any suggestions PLEASE raise an issue on GitHub for me to track. Lastly, if anyone wants to help contribute please feel free to reach out.

NOTE TO SERVER ADMINS: You can prevent your site from being crawled by adding lemmy-search to your robots.txt for the user-agent.

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[–] [email protected] 95 points 2 years ago

this is awesome and very needed. Thank you.

[–] [email protected] 67 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Thanks for this! I was trying to figure out how to best replace the old "site:reddit.com" trick, and it did not quite work with lemmy with how it is federated. I hope that longer term we can get an "all" tab on lemmy that truly tries to pull from as many of the federated sites as possible to get us closer to the Reddit experience. I tried to do some research on extreme heat clothing due to the wet bulb temps in my area but r/mensfashion and most other clothing reddits still seemed private, maybe I can try searching with your solution now.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago

Looks like your comment got triple posted. The lemmy instances are getting slammed lol

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Missed opportunity to name it "Loogle"

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Nobody has mentioned it yet, but https://fedi-search.com/ already exists

[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 years ago

Yes but that search doesn't take you to the instance that you are logged into already. Which is one of my main goals with this site. While that did give me the inspiration for this and has the power of Google behind it, it lacks knowledge about how the fediverse actually works.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Can it filter NSFW posts? As on Reddit you can search "pussy nsfw:no" and get pictures of cats.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 years ago

Why do I learn about this now that I pretty much don't care?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not yet but I can add this feature

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Can you add a nsfw:only filter while you’re at it? :)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

And make it default ;-)

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Wondering if this will see the same backlash that Mastodon had when users were planning to add a search engine - many users moved to Mastodon specifically because their posts are unsearchable by default, and that prevents some dogpiling that was common on Twitter.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 years ago

Great heads up

I just don’t get why people would join SOCIAL media if they don’t want to their posts public. Its like having a group meeting in the middle of a public square and complain people saw them

Maybe they should just use discord or or private communities instead

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

I've already got some complaints about that. You can see one of the issues raised on GitHub.

At the moment, I'm only picking up mastodon posts that are federated to Lemmy, but you can't choose Mastodon as a preferred-instance, yet. When and/if I decide to add Mastodon support, I'll reach out to the admins over there to get feedback first.

Edit and note to any server admin: If you want to block the crawler from hitting your site, just add lemmy-search to your robots.txt and crawling will be prevented. But this doesn't stop cross-federation posts from being picked up on another instance.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Thats very considerate of you

Please don’t take those complaints as negative feedback. I don’t think Lemmy is designed to be private and your search engine would be a great of help to the whole community.

By the way, do you plan to create a community to discuss about your search engine? Maybe users can help you with testing or report issues or improvement

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've got a discord page up and going that is invite only right now. No offense to anyone here but i didn't want to be overwhelmed with users joining in on the discord chat just yet. If you want to help contribute or even just test you can easily find me on discord, and I'll give you an invite.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Starting a Search-Lemmy community here might be good for visibility too.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Lemmy is not private in any way. In fact, while the OP's project is really cool and admirable, there is already https://fedi-search.com, which searches top Lemmy instances (and kbin, Mastodon, and peertube) using regular operators behind the scenes in Google, Bing or DDG (whichever you prefer), because those search engines already crawl Lemmy along with the rest of the internet, unless the site owners block crawling via robots.txt.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

TBH they can block them from search in the preferences. Otherwise anything on the Web is searchable and findable.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago (4 children)

This is great! I was so annoyed by the links not going to my home instance that I made this userscript (Lemmy post)! It rewrites all links on all websites to always point to your home instance.

Could be a nice addition for everyone that likes this website :)

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago

Holy fuck I've been thinking about how annoying it is that I can't search lemmy for a few days now - and here you are suddenly just handing the tool I want to me with features that I didn't even think about. THANK YOU SO MUCH. Adding this post to my saved.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)

make those results sort- and exportable (CSV, JSON, XML or the like), and you could be the new redditsearch.io. especially filtering results by different community/time/author would be great, and sorting by length/upvotes. what was that site with reddit post statistics called again? I know, this all might be further out, and wrangling bugs, the changing API and cloudflare might be more pressing issues, but maybe put it on the feature request list somewhere? all the best, and thank you for making this!

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Can you tell me how to use search-lemmy to find this post that I created yesterday?

Getting started with net-snmp in C++

When searching for "snmp" I get zero results. When searching for "net-snmp", I get 37 unrelated results, none of which is my post.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (6 children)

It might not have been crawled yet. The search engine will periodically search for new content but this isn't instant. So it may take a day or two to find it.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Cool! Is there a way to search all instances at once?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Due to a one of my primary goals of having links open in your home instance, you can only search a single instance at a time.

There's an open issue about this though but it requires some changes to Lemmy itself to work.

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[–] machineunlearning 12 points 2 years ago

Beautiful work.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Really nice work! I was excited since we talked about it, and it definitely delivers imo!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Ya, now if everyone can stop finding bugs! So I can take some time off. /jk

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Haha yeah! You might have to resort to an internet-less vacation :p

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Blocked by cloudflare ID 7e0ba74959214ac0 Client Thunder (Android) Instance lemmy.world

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It says I am blocked from using it. Any reason?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Same. I guess it is some Cloudflare service to prevent DDoS attacks or something

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Hugged to death.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not very knowledgeable on programming, but isn't there a way to implement this code with the Lemmy/fediverse devs to integrate this to the site and afterwards to the different apps used to browse it?

Great contribution regardless, thanks for your work!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

See one of my other replies. But that was a thought originally. Just hook into the original database instead of crawling using the APIs. Problem is, the table structure required to search is much different than that of a community form. At least if you want to do searches quickly. It takes me almost 5-10 seconds just to process 50 posts at the moment, and I'm doing those in batches... but ya maybe in the future I can talk to the Lemmy devs and see about merging these two projects?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Doesn't seem to work with for me (on jerboa). Says site does not exist when I click on a link.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

hmm, site:lemmy.world cat

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

"some search string instance:lemmy.world".

Keywords are:

instance:<instance name>

community:!<community name>@<instance name>

and

author:@<author name>@<instance name>.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (5 children)

P.S. to those trying to use a filter, I have a bug that's been discovered: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/issues/13

Long story short, make sure to put your query first and the filter at the end (with no space between the simicolon)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Hoping there will be a way to integrate it with kbin soon!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

I can't give a timeframe on Kbin yet, as I want to get it as stable as possible with Lemmy. fist. But I think Kbin will probably be next on my radar as the overall structure of the two platforms is very similar.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

hmm the site is not loading for me, i'm from the Philippines if that matters. It just keeps on loading. Will try again

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