Could it be possible to have one major global instance that aggregates everything so it can be indexed by search engines? Would that work? Or do I not fully understand how federation works?
It becomes a central choke point of moderation. Who gets to decide what instances are part of global and which ones aren’t. Because a free for all isn’t going to end well. And then you’re back at Reddit.
Right, but having a centralised search index thingy is better than none at all. Maybe there could be something where it’s a joint effort from admins from many of the biggest servers, idk if that would work.
Lemmy search already is quite excellent… at least here on lemm.ee, we don’t have many communities but tons of users subscribed to probably about everything on the lemmyverse so the servers have it all.
It might be interesting to team up with something like YaCy: Instances could operate as YaCy peers for everything they have. That is, integrate a p2p search protocol into ActivityPub itself so that also smaller instances can find everything. Ordinary YaCy instances, doing mostly web crawling, can in turn use posts here as interesting starting points.
Could it be possible to have one major global instance that aggregates everything so it can be indexed by search engines? Would that work? Or do I not fully understand how federation works?
That would defeat the purpose of federation.
It becomes a central choke point of moderation. Who gets to decide what instances are part of global and which ones aren’t. Because a free for all isn’t going to end well. And then you’re back at Reddit.
Right, but having a centralised search index thingy is better than none at all. Maybe there could be something where it’s a joint effort from admins from many of the biggest servers, idk if that would work.
Lemmy search already is quite excellent… at least here on lemm.ee, we don’t have many communities but tons of users subscribed to probably about everything on the lemmyverse so the servers have it all.
It might be interesting to team up with something like YaCy: Instances could operate as YaCy peers for everything they have. That is, integrate a p2p search protocol into ActivityPub itself so that also smaller instances can find everything. Ordinary YaCy instances, doing mostly web crawling, can in turn use posts here as interesting starting points.