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Piefed now has a built-in alternative to Lemmyverse to discover and search for active communities, with the "Active people" filter on the communities page (weekly basis) (lemmy.zip)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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To see it in action:

Crust.piefed.social (the Piefed development instance)

Not all instances implement it yet, I guess it depends how often they pull from the dev branch

Example of search for 'movies'

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[–] 11 points 1 year ago (22 children)

Out of interest, what is search like on Piefed? Lemmy’s is all but useless. Even filtering by "last week" will show me two year-old posts and comments, regularly that don’t actually include the word I’m looking for.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Lemmy's search is a lot better if you don't use the 'All' type, like just search comments and posts. With 'All', it is basically useless. Like sorting by controversial on a user's profile.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Here's a search I did just now. Despite trying to restrict it to the last month ("Top Month"), none of the results on the first page are within the last month.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Ah, right comments don't actually top with time ranges in 0.19: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html#sorting-comments, my bad. The fact lemmy-ui still shows all of them is very confusing, I'll admit.

    This is different in 1.0, the logic was changed for both posts and comments so these will work in future.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (6 children)

    https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html#sorting-comments

    That's a page that really shouldn't be relevant, and it concerns me if it is, because the search page should not be working on the same ordering logic that comment pages or the front page use.

    Anyway, I mainly only use the "top month" option as a proxy for what I really want, which is "filter by posts/comments in the last month", usually because I'm searching for something I saw recently, and I have a rough idea of when it was posted.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Eh, I don't think it's that surprising. Getting a list of comments on a post vs getting them from a search term are very similar operations, so it doesn't make too much sense for these to have different queries in the backend. One thing you could do, but no client to my knowledge does, is add a search bar to a post that searches through the comments only within that thread.

    Everything in the backend uses the same sorting as the posts do on that page except comments, which is frustrating. Comments do need a different sort enum as there are some options that don't apply to comments (scaled, new comments, etc.), but yeah the fact the top options don't work for comment search when they should is opaque and not user friendly.

    I can't wait for 1.0 to actually come out because I feel like a broken record, but this is fixed there.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    Eh, I don’t think it’s that surprising. Getting a list of comments on a post vs getting them from a search term are very similar operations, so it doesn’t make too much sense for these to have different queries in the backend

    Sure, but one would have thought that the ordering in a search is fundamentally different from the ordering in other places. Because you want something that contains the words you've searched for near each other to appear ahead of a post that has those words scattered at random because it's a 500 word essay. You want exact word matches prioritised ahead of entirely unrelated words that include the same characters. Like "enum" should turn up your comment, but rank a comment that contains the text "renumbers" much more lowly. A particularly smart search page might keep "enumerate" high while rejecting "renumbers", though.

    Of course, it's true that at least in the current latest release, Lemmy fails at all of this. I hope 1.0 is at least fixing some of it?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    This doesn't have anything to do with sort ordering though, which is based on time and votes. Text search is just a filter on top of sorting.

    You want exact word matches prioritised ahead of entirely unrelated words that include the same characters. Like “enum” should turn up your comment, but rank a comment that contains the text “renumbers” much more lowly. A particularly smart search page might keep “enumerate” high while rejecting “renumbers”, though.

    Of course, it’s true that at least in the current latest release, Lemmy fails at all of this. I hope 1.0 is at least fixing some of it?

    How Lemmy does text search is via pg_trgm which works by breaking down both the content text and search text into trigram* and if the content contains enough of the search trigrams, it's considered to match the search term.

    * A trigram is just a 3 character 'words', for example the trigram of 'enum' is {" e"," en",enu,num,"um "}.

    What you're describing is closer to a tsvector, so you could open up an issues on Lemmy's GitHub to move from trigram to tsvector. One advantage trigrams have though is that they're language agnostic while tsvectoss need both a dictionary and to know the language (thankfully, Lemmy already has this info via the language setting, though the way it's stored will need to be changed to accommodate this). But tsvectors does provide much more intuitive language matching, like what you outlined.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    This doesn’t have anything to do with sort ordering though, which is based on time and votes. Text search is just a filter on top of sorting.

    That doesn't feel like how search should work. It should be ranking results that fit the search query better higher than ones that fit it less. Regardless of how the search is done, that should remain true. So if you're using trigram matching, instead of a binary "does the comment contain 80% of the trigrams in the search query", it should be "if it contains 100% of the trigrams from the search query, rank it higher than something with 90% match, which is higher than 80%." Or maybe not that precisely, but something so that more relevant results appear above less relevant ones.

    Without doing something like that, it's just...not very useful. Which is the observed behaviour of search on Lemmy right now which started this whole conversation.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That doesn’t feel like how search should work. It should be ranking results that fit the search query better higher than ones that fit it less.

    But the existing filters already prescribe an order outside of how closely the search term matches, you brought up top month and I don't see how you'd want that to work other than a binary filter sorted by votes.

    What you're describing would be a new sort order, analogous to Reddit's 'Relevance' sort. It's certainly doable with postgres' builtin distancing operators, though it be slower.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    you brought up top month and I don’t see how you’d want that to work

    The truth is I don't want "top month". What I really want is "best result, filtered by this month". But unfortunately that doesn't exist, and in the absence of that, I use "top month".

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Curious, I've found Lemmy search to be okay. I don't search a lot on Piefed, so I can't compare.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Searching by "posts" on Lemmy is actually superior to searching on PieFed, though searching by "all" or "comments" on Lemmy is absolutely borken (haha misspelled unintentionally but Imma just leave it there as it fits so well!?:-P). Reputedly Lemmy's search is about to add the ability to filter on post "titles" separately from the rest of the text, which sounds very nice.

    So it's hit or miss what works or not on Lemmy. PieFed's search is the singular feature that is currently very behind compared to Lemmy, but like everything else I expect PieFed to rapidly overtake Lemmy one day soon-ish. Therefore I use a PieFed account as my daily main, but when I want to search for something I still switch back to Lemmy (you don't even need an account for that though).

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Yep I'm looking into options... https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/1235

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I figured that you would be! :-)

    Although to be clear, searching for content is not something that I do daily or even weekly, so personally I consider it much lower in prioritization than other feature requests, e.g. a comment reply has a Preview option but a top-level comment to a post does not (that button does not appear), notifications is still a bit wonky, particularly not interacting well with the newer feature that loads comments (when there is a larger number of them?) only after loading the post, and then by doing so fails to traverse to where the notification link was aiming to take me to, etc.

    Though I suppose others may consider it higher priority, especially newer people evaluating PieFed, and probably working on the search back-end may be a lot more fun!? :-P

    It is always nice to see new things coming to PieFed. This is the only software giving me any hope for social media right now:-).

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Searching by “posts” on Lemmy is actually superior to searching on PieFed, though searching by “all” or “comments” on Lemmy is absolutely borken

    Ah, that makes sense. I'll try to pay attention to which I'm doing, because my most recent search used only comments, but was absolutely useless.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Yeah anything that involves comments doesn't work so well - either them specifically or the combination of them and posts. And tbf it does retrieve the results of the query, it is only the sort options that fail miserably.

    I've used Lemmy now for >2 years and the excuse that "it's still in development" has very much worn thin when no changes at all have been made to this or so many other issues with it.

    At least the search function is still better than Reddit's! (Obligatory and reflexive fuck spex:-P)

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    At least the search function is still better than Reddit’s

    I actually don't agree. This is one area where Reddit's centralised nature is a benefit, because it makes it super easy for Google to index and return results. On-site search isn't great on Reddit, but at least Googling for stuff from Reddit works really well.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yes I meant the on-site one developed by Reddit, but agreed that the centralized nature lends itself towards searching by Google.

    Although the other way opens up a huge can of worms since every large, general-purpose instance will - due to the nature of how the ActivityPub protocol works - have basically all of the content of the entire Threadiverse. Or as near to that as it works for a first approximation anyway, e.g. someone deciding to index all content appearing on "Lemmy.World" would get all the memes, movie discussions, etc., missing chiefly things like piracy and anarchy and other things that LW has decided to ban. It won't be "correct" in the sense of attribution to the OP, but once someone found their way to the content housed on LW they are but a click away from getting to its original source anyway. So from that standpoint, Google indexing I would naively have thought would not be all that difficult? Except for the increasingly niche content that isn't federated with the largest instances, which is perhaps desirable anyway to not expose mainstream normies to content calling for e.g. actual murder in response to world events (such as occurs routinely on e.g. Hexbear).

    A safer, sanitized version of the Threadiverse that is searchable by anyone works to all of our advantage, I would believe?

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