While they’re a very, very, very, very small search engine, it looks like someone requested a Lemmy search lens and was finally implemented today.
While they’re a very, very, very, very small search engine, it looks like someone requested a Lemmy search lens and was finally implemented today.
Cool! How does it work?
On the main Kagi search page, under the dropdown for Lenses click “Fediverse Forum Search” or something.
It’s OK so far. It only indexes communities on the largest Lemmy instances (I wasn’t able to find communities hosted on my tiny instance) but it’s a start!
Would content from a smaller community not in the lens but federated with some instance which is on the Kagi lens show up in the results?
just tested it and yeah, it seems to work
Cool, that makes sense. I dont think there’s a way to search all of any federated system.
I wonder if searching for more content from a particular smaller instance makes it more likely to show up
I’m guessing they might just limit it to a hand-picked list of big instances for now.
In theory someone could get close to indexing all of a federated system by writing software that speaks activitypub, subscribe to a bunch of communities, and wait for the instances hosting those communities to push you new posts/comments, then use the domains of users in each new post/comment to add more instances to scan.
Not very well! But things can improve, and I appreciate the gesture.