There is a public API now. While I won't support sorting, you can process and do what you will with the results as-is. Currently I only support Posts and Communities for now.
When you search for posts you're just matching against the title or body. For communities it's searching the posts within that community.
There's also more filters now with: instance/community/author/since/until and a safe-search option.
So I'm not sure how close this comes to your idea but I thought I'd share.
First I can't speak for the Memmy devs but here's my personal experience:
In theory something like a mobile app doesn't really have any reoccurring costs, at least not with Lemmy, etc... Not natively, anyway. Sure there's the $100 cost for an iOS dev account but that's nothing in the end. Should Lemmy start to introduce API access fees, again that could change, but that's a long way off if ever.
The question really comes down to, long term, how much time are the devs spending on development and if they want to make money with this or not.
As some of us find this sort of development, well "fun", and just do this as a hobby rather than as an income stream. And any small costs we'll just eat because quite frankly we were going to build these apps anyway, if not just for ourselves why not share them with the rest of the community?
Long story short, Memmy (and the other mobile apps) may not need to charge anything as it's not costing the devs anything more than time. Now Lemmy itself, is a completely different story.
I can say one of the most requested features I keep getting requests for is a global search as well. I'm just blocked by a bug in Lemmy at the moment.
A tool to see better recommendations on who to follow could be interesting as well. I've recently added a new feature that allows for users to search communities (on Lemmy and Kbin) about what posts are actually talking about. I wonder if something similar could be built for users...
Clicking on the link would if you're currently on lemmy.world and it's taking you to programmingml.dev. But ya typing the URL into the browser bar shouldn't.
Something you might try... Logout and log back in and the look for the jwt cookie and see what properties are set on it. Maybe they've started using session only cookies?
How are you visiting the site? Are you typing the URL into the address bar yourself or are you going to Google and then clicking on the link?
For the later, a few weeks back Lemmy pushed a change that doesn't allow cookies to be seen if coming from an external domain. This change might have finally made it to your instance.
Yep. The idea is that the instance you select is the instance that all links will open up in. This way once you find a post you're looking for you don't have to find it on your home instance and can immediately start replying, save it for later, subscribe to the community, etc....
Just pushed a new update, that should fix an issue with the home-instance selector. Since you're on lemmy.world I'd suggest selecting that instance from the drop-down and trying your search again...
But https://www.search-lemmy.com. It has a few bugs but it should work for you. Especially if you set your home instance to something large like Lemmy.world.
Thanks. It shouldn't be long before I start considering the APIs stable enough that I can maybe reach out to the 3rd party app devs and then maybe who knows...
Ya I index both post titles and the post body. I also weigh the body content slightly higher as well. So posts that just link an article will usually show lower than posts that actually have content.
At some point though this will change. As eventually I'll start adding comment data to the index as well. But I'm waiting on a bug in Lemmy itself to be fixed before I begin working on that.
some query community:!ultralight@lemmy.world would search your community. Now, if this community is less than 24hrs old, it may not have been indexed yet, so you may just need to wait a day or so.
I've been seeing a few people ask for something like this recently, so I might try and see how hard it would be to build something to help find active communities.
Currently you can just search for posts. I don't track anything like the number of members in a community etc.. just the content of the post and how more or less accurate they are to your current query. I'm continuously trying to improve the page rankings though.
I guess in theory you can perform the same search multiple times with different community:!some_community@some_instance filters to see which returns the most results, but ya, that wouldn't be the most convenient. At the moment this tool though is about finding posts, but who knows what features I may add in the future.
This doesn't change the behavior of the built-in search within Lemmy. But rather this is suppose to be a close approximation of using Google with adding reddit to the end of your query.
The problem with the fediverse is that there are so many different instances you can't really include them all in a search query and even if you could the links that Google would provide wouldn't necessarily go to YOUR instance. This aims to fix that.
marsara9 @ marsara9 @lemmy.world Posts 3Comments 113Joined 2 yr. ago
There is a public API now. While I won't support sorting, you can process and do what you will with the results as-is. Currently I only support Posts and Communities for now.
When you search for posts you're just matching against the title or body. For communities it's searching the posts within that community.
There's also more filters now with: instance/community/author/since/until and a safe-search option.
So I'm not sure how close this comes to your idea but I thought I'd share.