[kazinator]

Here is a UI issue that could be a deal-breaker for many would be Mastodon users: broken search.

When I type a hashtag into the search box of any given instance, I get useless search results.

For instance if I search for #lisp on fosstodon, I get some hash tags that begin with #lisp, not #lisp itself. They all have very low activity, from several years ago.

If I do the same on another instance like mstdn.ca, I get nothing.

BUT: if I use the URL <domain>/tags/lisp, bam: recent stuff appears! On either instance. The same if I see the hash tag in a post and click on it.

Users are going to join Mastodon and try to use the search box to find content related to their interests, and falsely conclude that there is nothing, or next to nothing. That is going to cause some nonzero user attrition.

It's not just a problem for tags like #lisp, but mainstream things like #kids, #parenting, #dogs, what have you.

My home instance comes up with nothing for any of these searches, with or without hash. Not quite; for "dogs" it finds a user named "Elon Musk F___s Dogs" as its only search result.

[tedunangst]

Mastodon search is intentionally broken as some sort of abuse deterrent. Like you can't search for Fetterman and then reply to every post with an angry rant. Of course, also makes it impossible to find good content. This is somehow considered a feature.

[FormerBandmate]

It’s a feature in the same way desktop Linux’s reliance on commands and confusing user interface is a feature. It stops anyone but a group of cliquey antisocial coders who developed it from using it, and make sure it’s exactly perfect for their needs. They are then shocked when corporate alternatives that actually try to serve a general userbase (as well as having much more resources) take over everything.

It’s practically the history of open-source, unfortunately. Mozilla was able to resist that for a while but is unfortunately falling into the same trap

[kazinator]

But the issue I'm getting at is completely separate from that.

And anyway you can search for users by substring and then follow them and harass them.

Like in my example whereby I was searching for a dog and it found the user "Musk F___ Dogs".

I think the restriction is on searching for posts by substring of content.

[geek_at]

for me as a server admin I hate how incredibly annoying it is to set up a new instance. Even the docker setup is very poorly explained (as in not at all in the official documentation) and there are so many subsystems needed for the setup. There are many third party setup guides but most are so outdated that they don't work anymore

It's not self contained and after running an instance for a while you can be in update hell because the containers might need newer versions and you need to read up on every service and how to update that.

I much more appreciate the gitea approach. Simple setup, self contained but can be extended with external databases if needed

[hinkley]

I have a situation at work where someone keeps reporting CVEs to me and I don’t think they get that our docker base image gets automatically rebuilt every so many days and picks up all the fixed from Alpine. If we do nothing that window will close itself in a few days. So do you think we need to drop everything and work on this or just wait?

Sounds like Mastodon is missing some engineering discipline and maybe this is a good time for some to show up. Fixing some of this stuff before Twitter gets even worse would be a good thing.

[ashildr]

On the contrary I found it quite easy to set up a dockerized Mastodon system using prebuilt containers. It took me half a day of tinkering from not knowing anything about it to compose a system that was integrated into the rest of my infra that I was comfortable to invite my friends to.

What I am now completely oblivious to is KPIs to judge the health of the components.