Mastodon's Next Major Release Enables Full-Text Search
Mastodon's Next Major Release Enables Full-Text Search
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.
Let's see how many servers actually implement ElastiSearch. It's kinda resources-heavy.
30Yeah, I feel like they'd probably get better mileage with something like Meilisearch, which is what Firefish uses for search.
18It 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.
6
I like it :) Should make it easier for people to use.
27Finally, Mastodon will be using be usable for me.
9And no corporate publicity too
3Boo!
I liked when people had to put effort in and you could discuss things without coming up in searches.
-31If you don't want to come up in searches don't check the box in your profile that says "I want to come up in searches".
50That was never a thing on the fediverse... Search has been part of it since the beginning, just not on Mastodon
14It's opt-in (as in by default you are not going to show up on any search)
8Is that on new accounts too?
3
Kowtowed to the twitter crowd 👎🏼
-50Did they, though? A bunch of other Fediverse platforms have supported this for literally years, to the point that Mastodon was the butt of jokes for breaking basic search functionality.
Having standard search that just works is a huge deal, and helps solve against the decentralized content discovery problem.
44Not to mention, it's opt-in by default.
13
Seems like some of you guys want a secret club and not a proper forum/platform people use in a meaningful way.
35There is absolutely a segment of Mastodon users who behave like they do, and tbh I think there should always be small instances, but i also think this will be a great improvement.
6
It's completely opt in. Don't do anything and your posts won't be searched
12