Full Text Search is Coming in Mastodon 4.2.0 Officially

Mastodon developers officially announce that full-text search for public toots is finally coming in the 4.2.0 release of Mastodon. There is a big difference as compared to Firefish and Akkoma implementations, it will only apply to public toots and you have to opt into it. Once this feature becomes available in 4.2.0 Beta 3 and Sakurajima updated to it, indexing of public toots will be disabled by default. The user needs to opt-in.

So, for those who worry that this feature will increase the possibility of harassment, it won’t as you need to opt into it first and indexing of your public toots will be disabled by default. You cannot search for toots from users that haven’t opted in yet. They are only discoverable through hashtags only if there are any tags. This differs from the unofficial patch, which we don’t condone, that allows full text search of all toots without the users consent.

To make it easier to implement this feature in the near future, we finally set up ElasticSearch, which is required to make this work. We have it up and running, but for now, full text search is only for your personal toots and ones that you favorited. With 4.2.0 Beta 3 or later, public toots from opted-in users will be in the search results. We have updated the monthly cost for the addition of the ElasticSearch server. Since this server is not a critical service (search index can always be rebuilt), there won’t be backups on the ElasticSearch server.

As for posts from Misskey and other software, they will need to implement the indexable attribute (e.g opt-in) or otherwise, their posts will not show up on full-text search. I think this approach is better than willy-nilly indexing posts from all users without consent or an opt-out to reduce the possibility of the full-text feature from being abused by bad actors. This will also make posts discoverable from users who opt-in, but don’t tag any of their posts.