I only use memmy on iOS and the search function is great.
Thanks for the shout-out.
But FYI I’ve run into some bugs that’s preventing new content from being indexed. So you won’t see anything new (from about a week ago) until I can find a new method to fetch new posts.
Would it be better if your backend federates with popular instances so they push new posts and comments to your search engine? That way, you don’t need to scrape those instances to index their contents (because they’ll voluntarily send the contents to you via activitypub).
Yep that’s the new idea. The sad part is that with this method there’s no way to get historical data. Only new posts. So if a server goes down, gets DDOSd etc… I’ll lose posts forever.
Also building an ActivityPub implementation from scratch isn’t trivial either. So that’ll take some time.
I’ve got a few other ideas I’m playing with as well. Like just assuming that internal post IDs are all sequential and literally fetching them one by one. Or maybe some combination of both?
The issue is that you can’t search a ton of servers at once unless you index all their posts. To get a proper search engine someone would not only have to spend the time to code it but also the money to host that beast! :/
