@Zeugs @feditips @mho @jwildeboer @tchambers
Nothing much, really. The fediverse is still relatively small. You can still crawl and index all of it with one (big) commodity server.
@Zeugs @feditips @mho @jwildeboer @tchambers
Nothing much, really. The fediverse is still relatively small. You can still crawl and index all of it with one (big) commodity server.
@raphael @Zeugs @mho @jwildeboer @tchambers
One server that someone wealthy can purchase and do nasty stuff, the way Google has?
The point of this place is to avoid such pinch points.
@raphael @Zeugs @mho @jwildeboer @tchambers
How would it handle opting into indexing? Or would it just index everything it sees?
How would it deal with posts that it cannot see due to restricted visibility?
@feditips @Zeugs @mho @jwildeboer @tchambers No, one server that is affordable even by an independent software developer (such as myself and my business) and that could offer a service that is almost a commodity.
If any of these service providers tried to go rogue or evil, market forces would peg them down rather quickly.
@raphael @Zeugs @mho @jwildeboer @tchambers
It feels a bit wrong that people should be sacrificing privacy for the sake of making life easier for journalists. And is it really journalism if it depends on centralised indexing of people's posts?
Couldn't the journalists just have multiple accounts and do some manual digging? It's not that hard to find people, I do it all the time over on @FediFollows
@feditips @Zeugs @mho @jwildeboer @tchambers
These are implementation details which are orthogonal to the architecture.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't pretend that information in a social network can be private or shielded, and we should educate people that *everything* posted in the internet should be treated as public information.
I know that this is not a popular opinion though, so a search engine could be made opt-in.
@raphael @Zeugs @mho @jwildeboer @tchambers @FediFollows
Judging from the vast number of news stories that are essentially just embedded Twitter or Instagram posts, it feels like journalists have got used to centralised services and forgotten how they did stuff in the past.
I get what you're saying, that people shouldn't treat the Fediverse as a secure communcations system. There is a warning about this in Mastodon itself saying sensitive info shouldn't be sent through the DM system.
But you're treating privacy as a binary all-or-nothing thing, where anything that is revealed to spies and corporations will be visible to everyone, when it isn't.
Friction matters: any lock can be picked, but locks are still useful in keeping people out of your home.
@feditips @Zeugs @mho @jwildeboer @tchambers @FediFollows there is no privacy being "sacrificed" here, that's my larger point. If the Fediverse ever becomes big enough, *someone* will index it. Having it "opt-in" is like asking "pretty please leave me alone" to 3-letter agencies and Big Data miners. Do you think they'll honor it?
Those that need real privacy should not even be on Mastodon and should use only provably secure communication channels.
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