To be perfectly honest, I love YaCy, and digging into it and exploring all it’s mysteries is rewarding at times, but the lack of clear, consistent, thorough step by step documentation, all in one place can be very frustrating.
For example, my recent post covering or addressing how to use the “site:” search.to instruct Yacy to search the content of just one website or domain.
The instructions I stumbled upon here: https://wiki.yacy.net/index.php/En:SearchParameters didn’t seem to work. About a year ago I spent untold hours struggling, using trial and error to try to figure out this and probably half a dozen other recondite aspects of the program.
YaCy is a GIFT to the world, of, IMO, untold value and importance, and it is vital that more people learn how to use it, if we would have a free internet. By free, I do not necessarily mean without cost, I mean “by the people for the people” but how can that be, if “the people” give up, because they can’t understand how to use it.
It’s fine to say, you shouldn’t be using a search engine without understanding it. Great. But some of the inner workings of YaCy are so esoteric, I’m not sure there is more than one person on the planet who really knows what all is inside.
Language is an issue. Some time back I spent hours maticulusly trying to translate some of the available documentation from German to English, as that was mostly all I could find.
These aren’t really criticisms, but praise and appreciation. People love the IDEA of YaCy, I read that in review after review, but people just aren’t really able to use it due to the complexity and lack of understanding.
The developers are too busy to spend all their time explaining what may be obvious to them, over and over and over again, busy on the cutting edge, developing something new. And most people like myself, are too busy with the struggles of day to day life to figure it out by trial and error or in depth research with little guidance.
People sincerely want “a deeper understanding”.
I have tried, and would be happy to write documentation, but I don’t understand half of what YaCy can do myself, and only wish I had the freedom to spend more time trying to figure it all out.
I suppose if I knew Java, it would all be transparent. Just look at the source code, but that isn’t really true either. How many other things have been incorporated into YaCy that require in depth study? A lot.
If someone competent enough with YaCy could work on documentation, I would be glad to contribute financially to such a project.