Hello all. Like many new users, I am a reddit refugee. Please forgive me if this isn’t the best community for my question; I am still learning my way around here.

I am used to google searching “[THING] site:reddit.com” when I want to see the opinions of real people on a topic rather than the flood of clickbait articles you get nowadays with Google.

What is the best way to execute this type of search within the Fediverse rather than Reddit?

  • I am used to google searching “[THING] site:reddit.com”

    Might pick a few good representative instances on lemmy, mastodon, etc, then make a compound search:

    site:lemmy.ml OR site:mastodon.social [thing]

    then set up a search keyword like fs for it so you could type fs [thing]

    • This sounds reasonable. Hopefully comments are indexed in a way that Google still works. I’ve never heard of setting up a search keyword like that; looks kind of like a Unix alias. How do you do that?

  • Right now I don’t think there’s anything of that sort. And I’m not sure if there ever will (or should) be one in the future.

    The more Mastodon-y parts of fedi heavily look down on this sort of global search, as microblogging of that sort is generally a lot more personal compared to the community oriented focus of Lemmy/kbin. And it’s going to be pretty difficult to handle that in a way that both parts of the fediverse will be happy about, without giving abuse tools to people in the more “channy” corners of fedi.