Mastodon Full-Text Search
Renaud Chaput (via ednl, Hacker News):
Full text search has been merged in #Mastodon
mainbranch, and will be in the next (and final?) 4.2.0 beta.It is opt-in, so it will take some time to be filled with people content as they enable their profile to be indexed, but this was one of the most wanted Mastodon features for some time.
We plan to deploy it to mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the coming days to have a bit more feedback on it and see how it behaves in the wild.
To opt into your content being searchable, once your instance is upgraded to support this feature, head to the your profile, and the new “Privacy and reach” tag, then tick the “include public posts in search”.
This sounds great, since the lack of search is probably the most annoying part of Mastodon right now. It remains to be seen whether enough users will opt in to make this work.
Previously:
Update (2023-08-28): Mastodon Migration:
Full text search is now live on mastodon.social and mastodon.online.
It is “opt-in”, meaning you need to check the “Include public post in search results” box to enable your posts to be searchable: Click Preferences (on right near bottom [gear icon]) >>> Click Public Profile (on left near top [person icon]) >>> Click Privacy and reach box (near top [lock icon]) >>> Under Search (scroll down middle of page)
Here’s some information about the search syntax.
Also new in search is “from:me” operator to quickly narrow down search to your own post history.
You do NOT have to opt-in to full search for this to work! Your own data is always available to you regardless of other people’s ability to search for it.
Update (2024-09-20): Kuba Suder:
“Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput confirmed that between 8% and 10% of active accounts have opted into Mastodon’s search, a year after it has been released. It indicates one of the fundamental challenges of any design that is opt-in: very few people will change the default”
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I understand that opt-in is probably necessary based on the values Mastodon has evolved with. But opt-in will make this useless.
