One thing I miss from Twitter that Mastodon has only partially is to be able to search through the network for some keywords, like breaking news, events, and so on, so I can see other people takes on that.

So I made a small project that aims to fill this gap.

I’ve seen some previous attempts that made many people upset, I hope this time nobody will take their forks and pitches to burn me as it’s:

• calling mastodon instances public local timelines via their API
• takes only posts that are made by accounts that OPT-IN to being indexed (there’s noindex flag that I honor)
• keeps the posts in database for a short time (currently one hour) to avoid abuse and also to lower costs of running it

It gives me a lot of fun and for me it’s quite useful, so I guess someone might find it useful as well.

Also, it’s open source, but GPL license so it stays FOSS forever.

Happy to take any feedback, also happy to add some instances that are not yet being listened to. It turns out opt-in people are not that many so adding even large instances doesn’t make my server belly up.

Instances: https://github.com/Kukei-eu/kukei-masto/blob/main/server/instances.js