0xCAFe

Hey, how’s it going? Are you still working on it?

Sorry for this huge delay, sometimes RL takes over… I don’t know how relevant it still is. I’ll try anyway.

but if there is some way for people, posts, communities, servers, to opt out then ok.

I think this could pose an issue. Many people in the Fediverse are very sensitive about informed consent — which cannot be satisfied by any opt-out mechanism. This is an issue for every bridge/search service, because with opt-in you will have way less users. I strongly recommend to go for opt-in however, you will be starkly criticized otherwise.

I’m wanting to do this open source, which means anybody can take it, remove the check and scan everything. What are your thoughts about that?

Yes, anybody could do that, or build something from scratch, but will meet strong opposition in the Fediserve, as we’ve seen more than once.

If you know how to query servers, communities, posts or comments on that topic I’m all ears, I’m only doing 50% of that today BTW.

Can’t help here, sorry.

On a side note, where is your 0xCAFE come from? Is it like the stack overflow/ memory error checks like 0xDEAD(or 0xDEADBEEF) and so?

Nope, just a nerd who likes computery stuff like hex numbers and, obviously, coffee. No technical magic number I know of (maybe there still is…?).

They’re talking too much business to be a ‘private’ search. They don’t make any effort to explain how their search is private at all (except the 90/10 share model).

• Firefox (often preinstalled)
• Thunderbird
• Code
• FreeTube & Stremio
• Apostrophe
• KeePass
• Nextcloud
• Syncthing
• yt-dlp

oh, Good luck with that. Make sure however to respect the users privacy and indexing preferences. People in the Fediverse are very privacy consious and not everyone likes their post scraped and indexed.

I’d start with the Mastodon docs, it’s a solid resource to get started.

While this chart certainly shows how dominant mastodon.social in the Fediverse is, I like this chart. It also shows how diverse the Fediverse is. For any other social network this graph would be a simple circle. For the Fediverse it shows 38 different servers, and apart from mastodon.social, the distribution seems quite fair.

Very good!