not sure if this is actually a good design decision on our part, but we are consciously excluding a global full-text search from cohost for the time being, because we think global full-text search as a feature is the sort of thing that leads to context collapse and dogpiles out of proportion to the benefits it provides. if you want your post to be searchable by people who don't follow you, in general, we suggest you tag it. (and you can always go back and add tags to a post after you post it! they'll show up in the tag page just the same.)
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member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist
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if bluesky has a million haters I am one of them, if bluesky has one hater that's me, if bluesky has no haters then I am no more on the earth (more details: https://cohost.org/vogon/post/1845751-bonus-pure-speculati)
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in reply to @vogon's post:
I think this is a good idea. People can always do it via outside search engines if they want, but IMO you adding a little bit of friction there is useful.
Since you specify global, does this leave open full-text searching of our own posts? I realize it might be resource-expensive to create and maintain an index for something like that.
yep! we've also talked about the possibility of creating a search with a horizon of a couple hops away from you in the social graph. but no commitments just yet.
random idea: search among things you've seen before. since that's the only reason i've searched on social media. "argh where the hell is that post now" :D
unfortunately on the other hand it's kinda creepy to maintain db entries specifically for that and it's a performance hit (turning reads into writes) so probably not a good idea actually. but damn computers are bad at answering that question
yeah, we're definitely planning on adding a liked chosts view! we'll see if we can put a search on that as well.
This one is really intriguing to me because it might allow me to reconstruct some sick conversation I had nine months ago but cannot find the tags for
without being able to hunt down every person who ever said something problematic about Vriska Homestuck, or what-have-you.
Strongly endorse. Also as much as Google is evil putting general search back in the hands of search instead making a completely vertically integrated system is a good strike against Four Website syndrome.
I don't know that I actually like this - when I search for posts I might have enjoyed in the past (including posts that I myself made) I'm usually using search terms based on details I can remember, which might not always make it into the tags (and that's assuming the user (again, including myself here) even remembered to add tags). I guess maybe if there were a way to limit full-text search strictly to following/followers, but as you're describing it here it feels like a pretty huge baby is being thrown out with the bathwater in terms of UX
Of course, that being said, I don't know that ANY of the major socials have full-text search that's anywhere near to being functional, so, whatever
I guess maybe if there were a way to limit full-text search strictly to following/followers
yeah, this is something we're explicitly not ruling out (even possibly 2 or 3 hops away, close enough that people can yell at you if you're being a shithead) -- just not global
FWIW, this is exactly the thing I am always wishing I could do on twitter! I don't want to be private, but I also don't want some asshole hopping in my mentions because I mentioned a buzzword.
What I think might help discoverability a bit would actually be adding some gentle reminder in the UI when you're about to post an untagged post – as simple as just making the "add tags" prompt a bit more visible.
this is a good point, I'll pass it around and see if we can come up with something that makes sense for this