I remember when I was working at Technorati, the first and best blog search engine, and Google announced it was going to do blog search. We said something very similar to this:
Maybe mastodon will fare better. I hope it does. But I recommend caution. It takes a lot of ants to overcome a boot that big.
I also wonder, when the big players start federating (Tumblr and Insta are both supposedly on the way) and flooding the fediverse, if it'll make Gargon rethink his aversion to local-only posting. The fediverse is poised to get a lot bigger and a lot more noisy very quickly. When that happens, it's going to force a lot of changes.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8427#issuecomment-415969018
@fraying The discussion on that issue is very interesting, because I like local only posts, and really wish I was on a hometown instance mostly for that, but I simultaneously think he is correct about the negative effect it would have if mastodon.social (or any of the, say, top 5) supported them.
I wonder if maybe part of the issue is that the software needs a way to do an explicit pull. That seems to be a big part of the “missing replies” problem, and could help here.
@a right, which really exemplifies the problem with having the guy deciding what gets in the software being the guy running the largest instance.
