Hello all. Like many new users, I am a reddit refugee. Please forgive me if this isn’t the best community for my question; I am still learning my way around here.

I am used to google searching “[THING] site:reddit.com” when I want to see the opinions of real people on a topic rather than the flood of clickbait articles you get nowadays with Google.

What is the best way to execute this type of search within the Fediverse rather than Reddit?

  • bbbhltz@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Searching different instances is sometimes turned off or even frowned upon. I think indexing is “opt-in” in many cases.

    Searching Lemmy might be a different story. You may need to create some sort of filter to search multiple instances. You could probably set up a focus filter on Mojeek https://www.mojeek.com/focus/ and see how that does.

    • bbbhltz@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Just to follow up here.

      Mojeek can search multiple sites at the same time and create a filter bubble thing.

      Most search engines use the site: operator so focus on one site. Mojeek Focus lets you create a set of sites to search. If you plug in a bunch of Lemmy instances you can sort of search across instances.

      For example, I used the following to search across a few instances:

      {"lemmy":"i=beehaw.org,lemmy.ml,lemmy.world,feddit.de,sh.itjust.works,sopuli.xyz"} (you can Restore that on the Focus dashboard to use the same filter, and add to it as well).

      screenshot: Mojeek Focus searching for "Debian"

      Not great, but it complements the available built-in search.