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?
Technically speaking, little is stopping anyone from doing this.
I’m not sure what you’d gain by this, though. You just end up being flagged as a malicious bot and blocked by most instances, and probably hated by most of your audience.
Post privacy is mostly “please be nice and respect my wishes”. Not doing that is just dick thing to do.
Also, depending on how the search engine is set up (personal project? independent organisation? receiving donations?) this could end up falling afoul to the GDPR and other data protection laws.
Unless you’re in it to make money by selling data, getting rid of the goodwill people have for useful Fediverse services just sounds counterproductive. The whole Fediverse network is a privacy compliance nightmare (why do you think Threads is doing one-way ActivityPub traffic at the moment?) and the only reasons half the servers aren’t shut down or fined is that most people don’t dislike any of them enough to take proper legal action.
again it’s not going to servers and scraping data, it would be sitting somewhere receiving public data that is pushed out. There’s no malicious getting around privacy settings, if it’s pushed out then it’s free game. I agree about post privacy, but again activitypub already takes care of that