@atomicpoet "If you change your mind, just remove the magic word in your profile. Tootfinder will stop indexing your account and your toots will eventually disappear from our database (after 3 months)." Why 3 months?
@atomicpoet@fediversenews I for one welcome search. And, the steps were easy. I'm already searchable. Search, lists, hashtags - these have always been my go to tools to find what I am looking for - also to connect with people world-wide.
@atomicpoet@fediversenews It's a very stereotypically Mastodon solution. I have to put a special code word in my bio? And then also submit my username to a third-party database? No, thanks.
@Crazypedia@KeithAmmann@atomicpoet@fediversenews then, the community would pile on the author of the search engine which disrespects the robot.txt directives, as usual, and the search engine would probably shut down
@atomicpoet I would love this. The other day I was watching the Norway / Philippines game and I searched Norway and found nothing concerning the game, but I know people were probably writing about it. They just weren’t writing “amazing that #norway has three #goals already against #philippines in the #worldcup#womensworldcup#wwc”
I'd wait a while before promoting; DNS issues, veeeerrry slow response, obvious to-dos like, there's no way to get back to the Home screen from a search result. Let them polish it up a bit.
Maybe I'm very ignorant about this, but why exactly is the ability to be able to search within the contents of toots (aside from hashtags) controversial?
computational resources. Find is expensive for independent small servers to maintain.
sovereignty. Find means your content can be... well, found. Google can index it, IA companys can search and train shit with it, trolls can go after you mentioning specific topics, and a hell lot more. Lotta folks don't want any of this so fedi feels safer.
I can understand the first point. I don't know about the second point tho. Wouldn't Google or other search engines be able to index posts now too? And can't topic trolling be done now too by hashtags?
@semnosao@deurman@fediversenews@atomicpoet
Historically, the objection was always one of safety. Mastodon was something of a safe haven for marginalized and victimized people. People who would suffer organized harassment campaigns on traditional social media, people whose privacy is a matter of personal safety, etc, could come here and form communities in relative safety.
Their fear is that if you can be searched, then their harassers can find them and resume their attacks.
Personally, I think the solution is to have searchability be an extension of the visibility settings. As a user you have a switch that makes you visible or not to search engines etc, and the instance admin has a similar control for the whole instance. Then if you want safety, you go to a safe instance and turn on all the privacy settings. And if you want massive wide participation, you do the opposite. But that's just the opinion of a guy who is neither victimised nor marginalized.
Until that happens, people who want searchability have to settle for 3rd party services like announced above.
@uastronomer@semnosao@deurman@fediversenews@atomicpoet
Exactly.
We cannot pretend that people will be protected on an open platform.
It should be a setting on the account, and those who don't have it set should not be available to non authenticated users
The setup we have now is just heads in the sand, our content is being indexed, and is searchable by those who want to do it.
The search should be built-in, and so should the settings
@Deurman@fosstodon $ :idle: @Chris Trottier It allows right-wing extremists to search for #BIPOC or members of the #LGBTQIA+ community by searching for typical things they write and, once they've found some, to harass them.
@jupiter_rowland
I don't know... That feels like shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to even being found by people with similar interests/opinions. I assume most people want to be found, maybe not by everybody, but at least by some people. I assume (correct me if I'm wrong) that most people don't want to yell into a void.
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