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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

Twitter actually has a bunch of killer features when compared to Mastodon, to a degree where "toots can have a content warning" seems trivial. One massive one being "able to search tweets".

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If a poster wants their posts searchable then they hash tag key words. Those who don't want randos searching for vulnerable people they can dogpile onto can have that relative anonymity by avoiding contentious hash tags. It's a feature, although some exTwitterati disagree.

I'm of the #opinion that this isn't a #great #way to #implement #search #inside a #product. #Hopefully #whenever a #service goes #down, #people will #remember to #add the #required #hashtags for #other #people to be able to #find them using #search. #Personally I've seen #very #few #posts on my #Mastodon #feed use #hashtags, so #searching is nigh on #impossible, and I don't #think that's #because they're #avoiding #dogpiling.

If #people don't want #other #people to #dogpile their #social #media #accounts, perhaps they should just #make their #accounts #private. #Mastodon has #private #account #support, right?

Keyword spamming has been uncool since the 90s, when search engines were naive. Making every word in your post a keyword defeats the purpose - in Mastodon's case, it also makes it look ugly, I consider that a win

Search, or the lack thereof, is my least favorite thing about the fediverse. The federated nature means it's not feasible to search across all instances the way I can search across all of Twitter.

I mean, the Internet is decentralised and we still have Google and friends. It might be harder to implement than Twitter, but it's surely not "not feasible".

I meant "not feasible" as in "I currently have no way to do this", not "it can't possibly be set up by an entity determined enough".

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