For any social network, not just a federated one.
My thoughts: The way it works in big tech social networks is like this:
- **The organic methods: **
- your followee shares something from a poster you don’t follow
- someone you don’t follow comments on a post from someone you follow
- you join a group or community and find others you currently don’t follow
- The recommendation engine methods: content you do not follow shows up, and you are likely to engage in it based on statistical models. Big tech is pushing this more and more.
- Search: you specifically attempt to find what you’re looking for through some search capability. Big tech is pushing against this more and more.
In my opinion, the fediverse covers #1 well already. But #1 has a bubble effect. Your followees are less likely to share something very drastically different from what you already have.
The fediverse is principally opposed to #2, at least the way it is done in big tech. But maybe some variation of it could be done well.
#3 is a big weakness for fediverse. But I am curious how it would ideally manifest. Would it be full text search? Semantic search? Or something with more machine learning?
Yes, I was speaking about what would be ideal, and not what is possible today in the fediverse.
A search service could solve this issue.
If you want some search that covers as much of the Fediverse as possible, you’ll have to make it centralised in some way.
If you want some search that actually always covers all of the Fediverse all the way to instances that have only just been launched for the first time, you’ll have to make it fully centralised and hard-code that search into all Fediverse server apps. That way, when you first start your new private instance of whatever, it can immediately connect itself to that search engine and push any and all content on your instance to that search engine.
I don’t know how well you know the Fediverse outside Lemmy. But at least on Mastodon, but probably not only there, many of those who have been around for long enough would rebel against centralised search because they don’t want the Fediverse to rely on anything centralised.
Also, especially on Mastodon, you have those who strongly opposed the introduction of full-text search on Mastodon itself on the ground of full-text search being used in the Birdcage to find and then harass BIPoC and members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, many of whom have escaped to Mastodon because it did not have full-text search! There may actually still be Mastodon instances that run Mastodon 3.x in order to avoid the full-text search that was introduced with Mastodon 4.0.
Thus, covering exactly 100% of the Fediverse (the public Fediverse at least) would even be impossible with a centralised search engine. That is, unless that search engine managed to circumvent instance-wide blocks (you can be sure that places such as tech.lgbt or transfem.social would block the hell out of such a search engine) and ignore any and all kinds of search opt-outs.