Although search on a federated system seems to be almost impossible to implement at this point, I think it is a crucial step in taking back the web.

What I mean with this is: most of the people that are on the Fediverse right now seem to look very fondly on the World Wide Web as it was a decade ago. Before Social Media became gated communities, support for RSS was dropped everywhere, corporations found out that the web could be used for advertisements and tracking mechanisms were implemented.

Reddit has - until this summer - been a corner of the web where some of us still found valuable information and held discussions with real people. Back in the good old days we had homepages and blogs that we subscribed to and searched through. On Reddit we had our subreddits.

When I was looking for a discussion on a niche topic (or even honest product experience) I used my search term site:reddit.com on Google all the time. This basically meant: I’m only concerned for the part of the World Wide Web that is reddit.com and not deluted by corporate / seo / influencer bullshit.

With the Fediverse hopefully taking Reddit’s place, how do we go on from here? How do we narrow down our search scope to the useful part of the web nowadays?

Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion […]