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@buercher The point is, opt-in search is practially useless. Relatively very little people are gonna know or care to opt-in, and I can not really find anything of interest on this. Maybe it'll get better, but consider this: any active fedi server that's been connected to relays for a long time is gonna be a WAY better search engine than that will probably ever be. I've got an infinitely better searching experience on this server, despite it just being a hack and lacking chronological order and advanced searching features. I really think #Mastodon should have real search.

And so, this is the whole concept of @r000t's as:Public: to bring together all of these PUBLIC posts in PUBLIC feeds of all the different PUBLIC servers sharing PUBLIC relays into one central place that has the best coverage of the fediverse so you can *find* the things that interest you, old and new. Cause otherwise all we got are cesspools of random shit in timelines, and nobody really bothers to use hashtags most of the time!

But we have a bit of a culture war here. People traumatized by harassment hate searching, quote posts and discoverability features because they make it easier to harass, so mastodon sacrifices those things in disregard of all the GOOD things that can be done with them.

But I don't think this is reasonable because we already have solutions. You can opt-out individual posts as well as your profile from discoverability features, so all we need are the engines to honor these things. as:Public specifically only indexes posts marked public--it's literally the name of it. Yet people send him death threats, swat team, FBI over it.

I think the best thing to do is just keep going and develop useful things, especially when it's ethically reasonable. You can get mad at a search engine that disregards privacy settings but I think anyone getting mad over as:Public is really crazy and/or misinformed. I think @r000t should keep working on good things and stay strong against controversy rather than succumb to retaliatory malice, which only makes everything worse. Yeah, some people are assholes, but you just gotta suck it up and move on, protect yourself, obscure yourself... Cause it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing.

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