Search on global fediverse

[ballsystemlord]

I can find no search bar and your faq.md and online faq do not list a method of searching peertube leaving me with only the option of manually going to each site and searching it.
Is there something I am not seeing or is there a tool, like a browser plugin or cmdline tool like surfraw to search all of peertube?
Thanks!

[Chocobozzz]

No you can't for now. I a few ideas to do such thing:

• Have special nodes that follow every public PeerTube instance, index videos and provide a public search endpoint. These endpoints would be defined for example in the configuration file
• Redirect the user on a public search engine
• ?

[rigelk]

After some chit-chat about that, we discussed of a few possibilities:

• a single search endpoint on instances.joinpeertube.org which would index videos from all instances it knows about.
  • pros: no-brainer, it's just a single endpoint we do requests to, consistent answers for everyone
  • cons: SPOF, instances may not want to rely or use project infra at all (so far instances.joinpeertube.org is just used as a convenience, but this would put it in place of an essential infrastructure), added cost to Framasoft, trust model is centralized
• each instance federates by flood-fill discovery (through their users interactions with new actors, or through the discovery of new actors in the comments, or via the addition of a relay to speed up that process) and keeps a local index that is larger than what is displayed. The search is done on that extended local database.
  • pros: decentralized, trust model is not modified
  • cons: small instances might have a hard time finding enough content (alleviated by relays), small instances might have a hard time searching through content as they federate with more instances (to verify).
• same as the previous option, but some instances declare themselves as indexes (because they feel like they have the capacity to do so, most likely) and others look for such indexes among the instances they explicitly follow (either automatically or by pinning a few of them). These indexes effectively serve as remote search endpoints for instances that don't have the ressources to do so.
  • pros: decentralized, trust model is modified but community-based (essentially we use indexes that we already trusted somehow, and pinning some of them ensures we effectively use trusted ones)
  • cons: answer delay might be higher, and we need to keep track of a score of which indexes are more efficient (in terms of time to answer, or in terms of completeness of the index for instance)

One downside of, as an instance administrator, following everything is that there's a lot less ability to moderate or curate or reliably categorize content. This can create problems for search quality, but also for community safety or legality.

Systems like the automated flood-fill discovery above would place a somewhat arbitrary moderation burden on every administrator, if I understand the description correctly.

On the other hand, a centralized server centralizes that moderation/curation/abuse-response role, for better or for worse.

Personally, as an administrator, I would not want this responsibility. I would disable a promiscuous federation feature like this, since I wouldn't want to be both the admin of my instance's content and the view of the entire fediverse that my instance provides. Other admins may be more open to take on that role, but then how will those instances deal with problems of illegal or otherwise undesirable content that threatens the instance or its users?

A central search server or multiple central search servers would avoid putting this extra responsibility on every instance administrator, and that may end up being a more useful service for users who are new to peertube anyway.

[Booteille]

Isn't possible to have a endpoint listing all the available instances with each instance categorized by theme? (themes could be "nature", "general", "politics", etc)
Then the instance owner choose in the list which instances he wants to follow by theme and/or one by one, as he prefers.

@Booteille, who would decide what the categories mean and what content to include or exclude? this is still a moderation job that has to be done; perhaps tags of some kind could help the instance admins and search admins share this work, but the work still exists.

[r4dh4l]

Hi all and thx @ballsystemlord for opening this issue!

I'm quite new to the concept of PeerTube but very interested in this concept because as home server administrator I want to support decentral IT service concepts in general.

Promoting PeerTube among my friends the fact that there is currently no "global search" was unfortunately somehow the "walk-away-point" for using PeerTube. Looking for the "global PeerTube search" I found this issue which is extremely interesting for me related to the pro/contra list. Actually I don't know which solution would be the best to preserve a strict decentral concept but what I can say for now: The explanation video What is PeerTube? (english subtitles) is not enough to explain the users how to use PeerTube, especially related to video search. People not used to decentral concepts simply don't understand the problem of a central search and refuse service with a different usability concept (even though the different concept is for their own good).

Anyway for now I would suggest: There should be an explanation text under every search box of a PeerTube node (or a symbol linking to it) that

1. explains that there is no global search (with a link to another text eplaining why, maybe this issue)
2. lists an overview of all other PeerTube nodes the current one is connected to so to indicate the range of the current search

Edit: Maybe the "there is no global search" explanation should be placed above any search results as well with a text like:

The decentral concept of PeerTube has no global search which means the results listed here don't reflect the whole PeerTube content of the web. The results listed here are content of the following PeerTube nodes this node is connected to:

- peertube.one
- peertube.three
- peertube.four
- peertube.z

[Other PeerTube nodes](https://joinpeertube.org/en/#getting-started) are not listed because the settings by the PeerTube administrator of this node (due to personal or legal reasons).

I understand that a sustainable solution of this issue needs a lot of time but until then PeerTube as software needs to pick up the people where they currently are (and the are in expectation of a global search). Explaining users why there is no global search would be the best solution that doesn't make anything wrong, just better. I'm very said to say but In the current state of the PeerTube usability the mass of the people won't accept it as long they are not educated better in decentral concepts (which unfortunately has to be done by PeerTube - What is PeerTube? (english subtitles) is just a (great) start for the needed "elucidation").

We could use Yacy to solve this issue.
Yacy is a FOSS and decentralized search engine so we can host instances of Yacy ourselves and define an operator for peertube videos. For example, if someone in Yacy will search for:

video:peertube cats

then it should output only peertube links about "cats". Now we can integrate this into peertube's website and pass search results from Yacy into peertube's UI seamlessly, without having the user to type any special commands, only the keywords he needs results for.

Note: It's worth mentioning that for this to work properly, most likely we'll need to crawl peertube websites ourselves (it's very simple to do), just as shown in this video.