They say it a lot, in that things made in the past were made better than things today.
leopardboy
If scraping is against their terms of service (and it probably is), then it doesn't seem like much of a legal gray zone to me. I think they would sue the people running the scrapers.
I used to work for a company that was constantly fighting scrapers. They loved our data! I have no idea how successful the bad guys were at doing it, but there were ways we could slow it down, block it, etc. Also, if you spend enough money with your CDN, there are lots of ways to deal with bots and scrapers. None of it is 100% effective, but you can sure make it a pain in the ass for your casual Lemmy admin.
I say we make our own content here, instead of pulling it from Reddit.
I didn't have this problem with Mastodon, but totally had it with Pixelfed. I don't think Pixelfed, at least at that time, supported relays. I scraped around pixelfed.social to find people to follow because I had an account there. It didn't seem possible at the time to see profiles on public servers, without having an account, so it was hard finding people. It was something I was used to do doing on Mastodon. In the end, I didn't have a positive experience running my own Pixelfed instance, and just decided to use pixelfed.social.
I do follow the developer and he's been making a lot of great progress. I've got the mobile app, and it's quite decent.
Basically just the hastle of maintaining and hosting it. My ideal situation would be an instance with a few people, where we can share some of the burden, and perhaps cost. But maybe that has its own headaches when there is a falling out etc.
All very good points. I wouldn't mind sharing the costs and burden with some folks, but I'm pretty happy just maintaining it myself. Again, for me, it's something I enjoy doing.
There are also other drawbacks with your own Mastodon instance in terms of discovering new people, as a lot of those tools are geared towards the server scope, and Mastodon prohibits a full index search.
I never really had that problem, but then I started out on other Mastodon instances and just migrated my account around until I ended up on my own personal instance. I also participate in several relays, which helps a lot. In the end, I've also spent time looking at the public feeds on other servers and browsing their profiles to find people. Another thing I did was participate in conversations, which was a good way to get mutual followers.
With that being said, I don't follow a ton of people either. I read my entire timeline, chronologically, so I keep it pretty tailored. I disable boosts and mute/unfollow people often.
I actually don’t know what the Lemmy policy is on indexing, but a way to search the entire Fediverse (or at least large parts of it) would help tremendously in popularizing it, I think. I understand why indexing would be blocked, but that seems a lot like security by obscurity to me, which I don’t think works very well.
Lemmy indexes everything on the server, as far as I know, which means you should be able to find local content and content federated to the instance.
Well, an instance is only going to have access to the data that's federated to it, which I'm pretty sure was the same situation with Usenet.
It sounds like your issue has to do with Mastodon's lack of full-text search, perhaps?