on #bluesky there literally is the guy with the big dial constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right

Cassandrich

@aud @jonny @ireneista Crawling rooted from Wikipedia really would not be that bad an idea.

jonny (good kind)

@dalias @aud @ireneista bootstrapping off anything is great but wikipedia links to like what percent of the web i wonder.

gaytabase

@jonny @dalias @aud @ireneista that depends if you count revisions. if you include revisions it has been spammed to oblivion.

jonny (good kind)

@dysfun @dalias @aud @ireneista well ok, assuming you mean stable links since the whole point of bootstrapping an index off it would be spam filtration

gaytabase

@jonny @dalias @aud @ireneista going to be better than most, but i'm not sure i'd jjust feed it all in and hope it's all signal.

jonny (good kind)

@dysfun @dalias @aud @ireneista same!

Irenes (many)

@dalias @aud @jonny well, it's about trying to make the test into a clear one that's easier for a machine, and the human raters who produce the ground truth data the machine is trained on, to assess

gaytabase

@jonny @dalias @aud @ireneista i considered this a while back btw, before putting in for a different project instead. main difference is i was going to curate the index, like the old days.

Irenes (many)

@dysfun @jonny @dalias @aud yeah we honestly are more enthusiastic about curated indexes than automated ones

... but then that line of thought takes us full circle to thinking the actual valuable thing is site owners having their personal favorite links at the bottom, and, this time around, refusing to take money for placement and not letting the prevalence of search engines convince them it's pointless

Irenes (many)

@dysfun @jonny @dalias @aud like... tech people, including ourselves, tend to be biased towards thinking in terms of solutions that are based on building something

that's what we've practiced doing, after all

but not every problem is really a "build a thing" problem

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] my current thought is that we need a map. How we use the map is, to some extent, not really germane to the underlying problem of “we don’t have one and we need one”.

I don’t know if this thought is really yet at the core of the issue but it’s where I am right now. I think, implicitly, I have an idea that as the map is drawn, we won’t just be exploring places but also building new ones and writing them down if they’re the kind of thing we might like to see.

It’s probably oversimplified and possibly naive, but.

gaytabase

@aud @jonny @dalias @ireneista a while back, i talked about making a bookmark sharing tool, like the old days. i thought it might be a good way to seed a search engine.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] it might not even be best to have a map, but many. In fact, I think that might be ideal. I think a concentration of visibility or control is not appropriate. It’s not hard to see how the concept of search has created awful hierarchies and rewards exploitation.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I’ve been thinking about that too! That if there is a tool to search, it should allow you to just trivially save things and pass them around. Oddly, I think ActivityStreams is a good format for that.

jonny (good kind)

@aud @dalias @dysfun @ireneista this statement should have an auto warn attached to it: turn back now

gaytabase

@aud @jonny @dalias @ireneista yes, i am just burned out on building fedi apps still.

anyway, you could choose to trust your friends and have their results appear in search etc. was the cool bit

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] lmao

But to be fair, repurposing social media platforms as information sharing platforms… not an awful idea, in a way.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] oh yeah, I get that. I mostly mean for compatibility’s sake, not specifically for activity pub itself.

gaytabase

@aud @jonny @dalias @ireneista anyway it is still seeming very important, so i might just build it without federation but designed to cope with it.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I agree. I think anything we can do to regain control over information access from the monopoly google has on it is… good. Informal networks seem like an excellent thing that… well, they already do exist, but a tool to help encourage them would be excellent.

I don’t know if there is an ideal distribution of control/power/authority over information, but I think even if it doesn’t exist we’re in a very bad place, right now.