I'm Starting A Search Engine For The Fediverse - eviltoast

Hey everyone,

This isn’t an announcement, just wanted peoples thoughts on this.

I think everyone knows searching the fediverse can be better. Googling doesn’t work too well, etc. So I wanted to do my part and help out.

Indexing all posts, etc is quite a lot to handle, so I wanted to start small and just focus on video search. I’ve started indexing videos from Peertube and other video websites. (Even YouTube but this could be removed to just focus on independent sites)

I know Peertube has their own search engine for videos. I will be reaching out to them. Compared to my site I’m planning it’ll have other video sources and be easier to use.

So that leads to feedback from you guys.

  • What do you think about indexing videos posted on the fediverse and other independent platforms?
  • Are there similar services?
  • Am I just wasting my time?
  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    11 months ago

    But ActivityPub already publishes all of the data out. I don’t think this is going out to servers asking for data, it’s listening to public data being broadcasted out. If people are broadcasting over activitypub then they’re okay with it being shared.

    If they don’t want it shared then they don’t have to publish ActivityPub to anyone. They can defederate from the search federation. Those tools already exist.