I shared bits and pieces of this before, but it's officially up and running now: https://www.search-lemmy.com/
This is an enhanced search engine for Lemmy. With a few primary goals:
- You can choose a preferred instance. After choosing what your primary instance is, and performing a search ALL links will open in that instance.
- This aims to be a replacement for using
site:reddit.comin Google, but just for the fediverse. - You can filter the search results by:
- Instance -- This will filter the results to only show communities that belong to a particular instance. Just type something like
instance:lemmy.wroldorinstance:https://lemmy.world/. This is separate from your preferred instance, such that you can search for posts on lemmy.world while still opening them on lemmy.ml. - Community -- You can refine the search by a specific community. You use the same syntax that you'd use here
community:[[email protected]](/c/[email protected]). - Author -- Similar to the above you can also filter by a specific author such as:
author:@[email protected].
- Instance -- This will filter the results to only show communities that belong to a particular instance. Just type something like
- The entire thing is open-source. You can view the code and even host your own instance... See more details here: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search.
NOTE: This only supports Lemmy instances for now. Other fediverse type instances may be in the future depending on how this works out.
I've been working on this over just the last few weeks, so it hasn't had a chance to crawl much of the fediverse yet. For now it only supports lemmy.world and lemmy.ml but other preferred-instances will come online as time goes by.
If anyone finds any bugs, and I'm sure you will, or if anyone has any suggestions PLEASE raise an issue on GitHub for me to track. Lastly, if anyone wants to help contribute please feel free to reach out.
NOTE TO SERVER ADMINS: You can prevent your site from being crawled by adding lemmy-server to your robots.txt for the user-agent.
Wondering if this will see the same backlash that Mastodon had when users were planning to add a search engine - many users moved to Mastodon specifically because their posts are unsearchable by default, and that prevents some dogpiling that was common on Twitter.
I've already got some complaints about that. You can see one of the issues raised on GitHub.
At the moment, I'm only picking up mastodon posts that are federated to Lemmy, but you can't choose Mastodon as a preferred-instance, yet. When and/if I decide to add Mastodon support, I'll reach out to the admins over there to get feedback first.
Edit and note to any server admin: If you want to block the crawler from hitting your site, just add
lemmy-searchto your robots.txt and crawling will be prevented. But this doesn't stop cross-federation posts from being picked up on another instance.I think it makes sense for a “redditlike” to be searchable, while also understanding that Mastodon is a different beast and can benefit from lack of search.
Don’t know if Mastodon posts on Lemmy instances have a specific characteristic, but perhaps you can consider filtering them out while keeping “regular” Lemmy posts and comments?