Hey everyone,
This isn’t an announcement, just wanted peoples thoughts on this.
I think everyone knows searching the fediverse can be better. Googling doesn’t work too well, etc. So I wanted to do my part and help out.
Indexing all posts, etc is quite a lot to handle, so I wanted to start small and just focus on video search. I’ve started indexing videos from Peertube and other video websites. (Even YouTube but this could be removed to just focus on independent sites)
I know Peertube has their own search engine for videos. I will be reaching out to them. Compared to my site I’m planning it’ll have other video sources and be easier to use.
So that leads to feedback from you guys.
- What do you think about indexing videos posted on the fediverse and other independent platforms?
- Are there similar services?
- Am I just wasting my time?
As the fediverse is almost exclusively run by volunteers that are paying server bills and being admins, I could see some larger instances not taking kindly to this, especially depending on how much stress it would be putting on some already at capacity servers.
Ideally, OP’s crawlers will just come from their own instance that other instance owners can defederate from if they want to opt out.
Yeah that would be the case.
That’s a good idea. Listen to public data being broadcasted out, then you aren’t worrying people with scraping or anything. It would only be from go live onward, but you would just be listening to the protocol.
How much bandwidth do you suppose a crawler would use? I’d guess very little
It will be very little if not downloading full html pages.
I was thinking more in terms of resources (number of spider threads X posts/communities/users being indexed) that would be now dedicated to a bot, not so much network traffic that is probably tiny if not downloading images.
Right, it would be an initial hit but if the bot was properly built it wouldn’t need to do full reindexing very often. I’m no expert but I think it could be done in a way that there is no noticeable spike in traffic or anything
That’s the thing, it would need to be done in chunks and have its revisits scheduled if you want to do a complete indexing of an instance. And for a large instance that’s a lot of DB thrashing if you aren’t spacing that out, or just sampling like “top 10 posts” or something, but that kind of data is going to make a useless search engine depending on the goal of the search engine. If you wanted to just catalog the daily top posts of the fediverse that might work, but if you want to catalog everything it’s going to take a lot of resources and a long time to make sure you’re not hammering people’s servers.