It's interesting sitting here on an old version of #Calckey seeing someone on #Mastodon server telling their fellow user that posting to unlisted will opt-out of #search when I can see Unlisted posts in my antennas quite easily though I believe this has been rightly rectified in the newest versions of [#Firefish / #Iceshrimp but need to confirm]. Being hidden from the Explore tab on Mastodon is not the same as being unsearchable across the fediverse. Frankly, there's little understanding even among admins across the #fediverse about what's a Mastodon / Mastodon API function that is federated to other Mastodon servers but doesn't translate well outside of Mastodon on other #ActivityPub connected platforms like #Misskey and it's forks, #Hubzilla and #Friendica, or rapidly growing platforms like #Lemmy and #Kbin. Kbin also scrapes posts from across the fediverse and puts them into its own magazines.
Unfortunately simple, up-to-date documentation doesn't really exist to explain the realities of federation vs what your admin said was the reality. AP was not built with privacy in mind, and 'security through obscurity' was mostly a Mastodon thing from when folks thought either the Mastoverse was almost the dark web, or the whole fediverse [which has never been the case], and Google et al weren't interested in scraping it.
Unfortunately we have a cadre of devs across all fedi platforms who'll give glowing lip-service to both the fedi and ActivityPub histories of being built by queer or other minority identities but still won't work on giving folks the granular #privacy and #safety controls that weren't included in those protocols, and whose feature roadmaps now just look like bird site 2.0 funded by the milquetoast liberals in political tech who provide their seed money.
Beyond Mastodon and GoToSocial, every other fediverse project treats posting to public as opting in to search and indexing. Indeed, this is pretty much how the ActivityPub protocol handles such too.
Beyond Mastodon and GoToSocial, every other fediverse project treats posting to public as opting in to search and indexing.
Yeah. And I think more or less that's fine. The internet isn't private. Most of us have been on the internet long enough to remember when there was absolutely zero facade of privacy online. That's just the reality of things. Be mindful of the information you volunteer and post.
Fwiw, Misskey does provides tools to deny indexing no matter what. However, these could be simply ignored by an individual or a search engine or a bot. You kinda have to trust that your wishes for not being indexed will be respected.
Otherwise, your alternative is, of course, non-public instances and/or posting private only.
@adiz Yes the bottom line is that every ActivityPub implementation has very poor privacy protections that federate outside their own APIs because they barely exist on the AP protocol. It's all been security through obscurity and cultural norming up to this point but that's all gone by the wayside now thanks to the fediverse's own success.
@skymtf@jo Yep. It's a huge job to do the merge, and Kaity is currently doing everything with 1 working arm and 1 broken arm. Our initial focus is getting everything over to the new hardware, and once that has been done, focus on the merge.
@jo I asked them to include a way to opt out of search without needing to opt out of discoverability, and they told me that it was a half solution and that if you need that type of privacy you would be better of privatizing your account :(
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