Search will never search non-local content.

Which is the point I’m trying to make: right now, you cannot use search as a discoverability medium, unless you’re on something the scale of mastodon.social.

Search with a focus on new content discoverability is utterly useless for smaller or single user instances, because a search that only finds things you already know about isn’t exactly a useful search for discoverability.

If I have to be on the biggest instances, then there’s very little difference between something like Bluesky and Mastodon in terms of usability, and uh, I might as well pick the one that’s more likely to have the most growth and diversity of content.

We have to give up on the idea of having easy and direct access to the whole of thw fediverse.

I agree, and it’s why I’ve pretty much migrated back to centralized services with the exception of Lemmy, because Lemmy works very well in terms of finding useful shit to follow in a way that literally no other federated platform does.

The problem I ran into is that every single platform that primarily interacted with Mastodon (The keys, etc.) had the same exact same set of problems.

While yes, my Firefish instance had search, what was it searching? Local data only, and once I figured out that Mastodon-style replies didn’t federate to all of someone’s followers, it became pretty clear that it was uh, not very useful.

You can search, but any given server may or may not have access to data you actually want and thus, well, you just plain cannot meaningfully search for shit unless you go to one of the mega instances, or join giant piles of relays and store gigabyte upon gigabyte upon gigabyte of garbage data you do not care about.

The whole implementation is kinda garbage for search-based discovery from it’s very basic design all the way through to everyone’s implementations.

For me, it’s full text search.

I tend to want to find an opinion on something very specific, so if I can just toss a phrase or model number or name of something into a search field and get actual non-AI, non-advertisement, non-stupid-shit results, that’d be absolutely ideal.

Like, say, how Google worked 15 years ago.

Install it and use it?

Their PDS is self hosted, but it does still rely on the central relays (though you COULD host that yourself if you wanted to pay for it, I suppose?).

It’s very centralized, but it’s not that different from what you’d have to do to make Mastodon useful: a small/single user instance will get zero content, even if you follow a lot of people, without also adding several relays to work around some of the design decisions made by the Mastodon team regarding replies and how federation works for those kind of things, as well as to populate hashtags and searches and such.

Though really you shouldn’t do any of that, and just use a good platform for discussion, like a forum or a threadiverse platform. (No seriously, absolutely hate “microblog” shit because it’s designed to just be zingers and hot takes and not actual meaningful conversations.)

15 million Series A financing

Maybe shitty corporate search engines are failing me, but has there been a stated valuation for Bluesky? Googling 'Bluesky valuation" or any combination thereof is a problem since that’s a business term so lol, lmao, search engine worthless.

$8m seed + $15m A series may be a shockingly small amount of equity, or it could be the whole damn company but I’m just not seeing it actually posted anywhere.

Yeah, it doesn’t appear that PSSR (which I cannot help but pronounce with an added i) is the highest quality upscaling out there, combined with console gamers not having experienced FSR/FSR2/FSR3’s uh, specialness is leading to people being confused why their faster console looks worse.

Hopefully Sony does something about the less than stellar quality in a PSSR2 or something relatively quickly, or they’re going to burn a lot of goodwill around the whole concept, much like how FSR is pretty much considered pretty trash by PC gamers.

Two thoughts come to mind:

1. If it’s there and you aren’t having it shoved down your throat, then that’s still a VAST improvement over Twitter, which has gone from shitty social media to blatant hate indoctrination platform.

and

2. Did you just now discover that most people are shitty? I always assumed most people figured that out at 13 or 14.

Oooh, ooh, I get to use my favorite theory on the internet!

So I don’t think it’s a violence vs pacifism fight, but rather the VERY clear fact that the Federation is technologically superior to all the antagonists they’ve had to deal with.

So much so that they willingly disregarded research into certain military technologies via treaties simply because they didn’t need them, and were very certain they’d be on the top of the heap even without them.

And it’d be why, when the Romulans returned, there was an implied ‘Well fuck!’ when they saw what a warbird looked like now, and that it was on par with the best the Federation was fielding.

So back to the technological superiority bit: Q actually says this before tossing the Enterprise to the Borg. Everyone was smug, because they knew they were superior to the Cardassians and Klingons and to some extent, even the Romulans still.

The Borg was a nasty wakeup call that, no, they’re not some pinnacle of engineering might but still on the bottom of the barrel and just deluded because everyone who happened to be neighbors were worse but that was only a fluke of uh, geography.

And for that theory: Q tossed the Enterprise at the Borg because he’s a fan of humans for some reason, and that was an easy way to force a massive military buildup and thus the only way the Federation had even the slightest chance against the Dominion.

discovery of the Borg, the Federation changed their ship designs

They hired a Klingon consultancy firm which suggested ‘Shoot first, and then have diplomatic conversations with their corpses.’ as the improved Federation policy.

So really, don’t need an empathic counselor.

Because most of us are arrogant, short-sighted, stupid, greedy, and have no empathy.

At this point I know I need to move to a blue as fuck state, or maybe emigrate to somewhere with better enshrined lgbt rights, universal healthcare, and legal weed, like say Mexico.

(I’m kidding but only just barely.)

You seem to have missed the global nuclear war that happened between the bell riots and shiny space communism.

Wouldn’t mind avoiding that, though it seems like thats getting more and more probable.

Things might get better, after everyone dies for stupid bullshit, but that’s hardly a comfort.

Yeah, I noticed that.

It’s on my to-do list for next week since I should have time to sort that out/file a bug if it’s something that’s not a configuration error.

My read was ‘we need to make more communities, AND we need more users’ and I’m not sure why more communities solves anything since I’ve shown Lemmy to several actual real touch-grass kind of friends and they’re all like ‘but why? there’s nothing there.’

Which is both very wrong, and completely understandable because if you go searching for a community about something, you’ll find a whole lot of no activity ones and that’s just a misleading and confusing presentation which they’re taking the wrong impression away from.

I don’t think there’s a group of users who are just sitting out there waiting for a community about Longaberger baskets to make the jump off reddit, but there are a LOT of people who would move if it looks like it’s not just another “reddit killer” with lots of empty zones of nothingness.

Hard disagree.

A million empty communities simply makes all of lemmy look like a barren wasteland nobody uses.

We, if anything, need to stop making a community for every single edgecase that someone might ever one day want to talk about, and focus on the basics, until there’s enough people interested in some random niche thing to justify adding the community.

That is to say, it should be organic community growth led by users making a more specific community from a larger community, and not server admins making, for example, 421,000 different sports team communities hoping users will somehow magically appear and use any of them.

Lemmy is still at the scale that a single /c/NFL could more than adequately handle the entire volume of people talking about NFL games, and we don’t really need a /c/ for each league, team, player, and coach or whatever.

Read up on the saga of /r/jailbait sometime if you want to be utterly confused how the FBI didn’t show up and arrest everyone involved with Reddit.

Yeah I’ve been noticing that. It’s probably a case of it being cheaper for them than games, but I’ve also noticed they’ve not yet done a cycle where it’s ONLY freemium stuff, at least.

Next week, for example, is an Apex skin and a game. If it was JUST the skin I’d probably be less gruntled, but as it is, I find it hard to get too upset that I’m only getting 1 free game instead of 2.

Excessively patient. I’ve noticed there’s basically a 50/50 chance of any game I find interesting showing up for free on Epic eventually, so I mean, fine, I’ll wait a couple of years to save $60. Why pay for something that’ll eventually be given to you, paid for by some vulture capitalist’s dragon horde?

I take some of their money, get a free game: win/win.

…at this point, I’m pretty sure my Epic games library is way bigger than my Steam library, simply from the 3-5 free games a month that Epic tosses at you, of which like 1/3rd are actually pretty good.

Yeah the first run backfill was noisy, but I’m inclined to leave it there unless it gets just way too loud. If it starts making the feed just noise and junk it’ll get yanked.

It’s a bot from the programming.dev peeps: https://github.com/programming-dot-dev/rss-bot

Added it, since it was an option. It uh, made a lot of posts, so you weren’t kidding about lots of free games.