Mastodon's Search updates are a huge boost for the platform.
I'm still sorting out what's been added and changed, but:
- People can now opt in to full-text search (this is disabled by default), through user preferences.
- There are apparently search modifiers, though I'm trying to track down the full sequence. "from:me <search terms>" will turn up your own content on specific terms.
I've long found that whether or not a platform has an effective search capability has a huge impact on how useful I find it. Hacker News's search (by Algolia) is a big draw of this site. The lack of effective search on services such as Ello (RIP, apparently), Diaspora, and Reddit (text posts are searchable, comments are not) played a large part in my ultimate dissatisfaction with those tools.
It's on the roadmap (https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap) - I gather that doing it _properly_ (requiring consent, working sensibly with non-Mastodon ActivityPub things, etc) is somewhat non-trivial.
But yeah, very much my most-looked-forward-to feature. I certainly understand the argument that it can increase toxicity, but requiring users to opt into being quotable should help there, and a lot of use on Twitter was non-toxic.
I'm still sorting out what's been added and changed, but:
- People can now opt in to full-text search (this is disabled by default), through user preferences.
- There are apparently search modifiers, though I'm trying to track down the full sequence. "from:me <search terms>" will turn up your own content on specific terms.
I've long found that whether or not a platform has an effective search capability has a huge impact on how useful I find it. Hacker News's search (by Algolia) is a big draw of this site. The lack of effective search on services such as Ello (RIP, apparently), Diaspora, and Reddit (text posts are searchable, comments are not) played a large part in my ultimate dissatisfaction with those tools.