"hot take": Hashtags enable (a level of) opt-in discovery; public full-text search (currently) does not.
Even if it did, like most people who do not want to be forcibly found in a search engine, I'd unlist all of my posts, flip my account to require follower authorization and look into authenticated fetching of posts if cross-instance full-text search came to be. Having such a Twitter-level abuse vector is why I avoid saying some things on there nowadays.
@voxpelli one doesn't need to dislike the open web to want to opt out of search. I only had negative spam/bot engagement come to my twitter experience from search
@voxpelli crawling of my personal toots/interactions, by standards compliant masto/fedi clients/servers. Same style as robots.txt - trying to do DRM or anti scraping or such is a losing battle.
@voxpelli@jalcine Sorry, I'm a bit over my head when it comes to topics like this. Are you saying that, as a microblogger, I have the same (professional? ethical?) obligation to be discoverable as a newspaper does? Or are you saying that I can't prevent this discoverability (remove my always already implied consent) given what the web is? A third option? I don't understand the comparison.
@claude_cahun@jalcine Sorry, it was a reference to the controversy that has been regarding a “link tax” that eg. newspapers has been pushing.
Newspapers wanting to demand payment from eg. Google and Facebook to allow them to link to their articles (and there has been cases where people has been sued) for linking to a piece of content.
It’s a notion based on a misunderstanding of the very concept of hyperlinks and the web and one that I hope most, including the #Fediverse, can agree is bad.
@claude_cahun@jalcine Yet, the notion that “any form of behavior that excludes consent” is bad would validate the belief of the newspapers, that they indeed have the right to deny consent to being linked to, and that can’t possibly be what @jalcine means.
So I brought it up as a comparison – that there are indeed limits to what kind of actions one can be expected to check consent for.
@voxpelli@jalcine Sure, but is the discoverability of my microblogging beyond that limit? I guess I'm not sure if this is a philosophical discussion about what is and is not within the limits of what should require consent, or if we're talking about whether or not microblogging should, in service of the open web, be discoverable.
Should eg. people be allowed to arbitrarily link to your microblogging notes?
And should there be different requirements between that content and the wider web? And how do we justify that and limit it? Should eg Lemmy content also have same limitations?
@voxpelli I like when I can tell a platform not to tell google about what I'm putting on the internet, but I don't know how I would prevent a person from linking to my public accounts on sites like this one. I would be against laws that make it illegal to direct people to a location on the internet. I can't/won't sue anyone for linking to what I've put on the internet, although I might try if it was part of a large-scale harassment campaign, a la kiwi farms or infowars.
I thought (and obviously @jalcine can correct me if I'm wrong) that what was being discussed in the OP is the utility and desirability of having microblogging platforms where (for instance) a person who writes about lesbian politics is not automatically collected under the search term "lesbian", but a person who writes about lesbian politics and includes the hashtag "lesbian" is collected along with other users of that hashtag. I'm in favor of this model, since it allows me a choice with regard to how open I want my door to be. I'm coming from a perspective of wanting to mitigate potential for harassment, although I understand why others (even those who are more frequently the targets of online harassment than I am) want searchability. I'd be more than happy with an option like tumblr has, where users opt in or out of being included in search results (although tumblr has truly terrible search, to the point where users describe it as fundamentally broken, so let's just pretend for the sake of example that it does work how it's supposed to). I guess I just don't understand push back on that, except if what we're talking about is a broader philosophical debate about the boundaries and specifics of consent as a model, rather than a more grounded discussion of whether or not (for instance) everyone who looks should /necessarily/ be able to see when a person uses the word "lesbian" in their posts, because otherwise it is a violation of the concept of the open web. I responded to your comment re: newspapers and "consent to link" because I think the difference between the two (a person not wanting their use of "lesbian" to be collected via search engine vs. newspapers trying to extract profit from other corporations or suing individuals for linking to their content) is so obvious that the comparison felt a bit strange, as though an individual's desire for a bit of privacy (yes, even in a situation where total privacy is impossible and there are myriad avenues for discovery and harassment) is akin to the wielding of corporate power. It felt like an abstracting of the topic so that the stakes became less clear, rather than more, which is why I asked for clarification. Tbh, I'm still not sure of your stance when it comes to specifics on the topic of (for instance) the searchability of microblogging platforms.
@jalcine I find many in the Fediverse style communities wants to find a single tech that suites both public broadcast style sharing and private group sharing.
Often ends up with requests of mutually exclusive concepts to be combined.
Like “public group sharing” where posts are public but can only be read by the group you wishes to.
Or “private broadcast style sharing” where it should broadcast a message everywhere except some places.
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