I was a bit melancholic about the internet yesterday, but I realize now that the feeling mostly came from the fact that search is very broken almost everywhere
Outside of fedi nobody uses hashtags anymore. So if you want to discover new opinion and current discussion on let’s say gardening you need to search specific terms and hope people are using them in their post
Or you go look for platform specific “categories/spaces” (twitter/facebook groups, subreddit); but those have problems:
- You need to assume people post there (if someone post on their personal profil instead you will not see it)
- Those spaces are fragmented (multiple groups for the same topic)
- Those groups sometime just don’t exist or are badly managed by the person in charge
- It’s sometimes hard to discover those groups in the first place (the UI don’t always present them clearly)
And outside of social media I will not shock anyone if I say that that Google is less than optimal to find individual voices on a specific topic.
This just adds to the fact that a very small percentage of netizen post anything on the public internet to begin with.
Discord/chat rooms are probably the best way to have current discussion on specific topic with people, but it’s outside of the public internet and is virtually impossible to discover unless you know someone already.
I care a lot about search because without it you’re kinda at the mercy of luck or algorithm to find current discussion on a subject you care about - and if it’s slightly niche this becomes almost impossible.
The only solution I can think of is automatic labelling of content (something an algo already does), but accessible/public and most importantly searchable. This on top of improving existing search engines (more filters like masto and twt does, synonyms and fuzzy search…)
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about it and had to get this off my chest 
