I keep stopping myself from doing this exact project, with the fediverse as the curation source, several times. I’ve talked about this before, but interestingly Postgres’ full-text search is effectively the complete core of a search engine, minus what you’d need for crawling and ranking (which is where curation and a bit of scripting would come in)
other than resources and time, one big open question is how to do this kind of thing as a positive part of the fediverse — to not make the same mistake that a bunch of techbros already have and index the fediverse without consent. how does one make the curation process simultaneously consensual and also automated enough that it can be reasonably ruggedized against abuse?
I think you’re absolutely correct, and this feels to me like the only reason why we’re seeing some of the bizarre shit we’ve been keeping an eye on: