@strypey @mint @r000t @Hyolobrika

> I would like to read more about this.

I'm not the expert, but I was there; the rough timeline was that they announced a closure, someone started archiving them, the adults running the site that billed itself as a place for LGBT kids to express their sexuality had things like half-dressed 12-year-old girls posting a selfies in bed and saying they were "bored", and that's the public timeline. The adults that ran the site were enthusiastic about this until the archiving started. The justification for the freakout was "What if their parents go reading the archive of a website about gay children hornyposting, and then find their own kid, and then kick the kid out of the house?" There was enough of a backlash that people are still freaking out about "archiving".

> I'd love for some of the public fediverse to be archived, but it's pretty obvious that it needs to be selective and opt-in.

Does it? Once a piece of data leaves your computer, you cannot control it. The whole thing reeks of an attempt at preemptive damage control, content-licensing, whatever. When I stood up this machine and pointed fsebugoutzone.org at it, I wrote in the instance description that it was a temporary domain for FSE, I put in the blog post that this was a temporary domain for FSE, I put "FSE" in the domain, and several Mastodongs freaked out regardless, and screenshat and archive.is'd (Are they worried I'm going to take down the blog post? Why would I announce something that I didn't want people to know?), and I didn't opt in, I didn't agree to anything, I never gave my consent to be quoted or to have anything I wrote reproduced. Quite the opposite: these people believe that it's important that they keep a copy I *cannot* delete. This is not just ignoring consent, but actively rejecting it. It does not bother me, though: they have a right to remember what they want and if they want to use a machine to help them remember, do I have some kind of right to not be quoted, copied, screenshitted, etc.? On the balance, I think the people that are most worried about this are doing something shady and they don't want anyone to connect the dots. berries.space is one such example.

Aside from that, everything you say on here is archived indefinitely by large swaths of fedi: there are 29,508 active servers as of this minute, and a large number of them have copies of this entire conversation.

Not just that, but a public archive is beneficial to the public. We had that run-in with the FBI a while back: I was trying to figure out how pedophiles kept landing on FSE, and poring over the logs, and I see boardreader.com. I start tugging at that thread and boardreader.com, owned by SocialGist, had been archiving the entirety of fedi, but only doing it by hammering FSE's public global timeline (through residential proxies and impersonating a browser), and then attributing everything on every server to to FSE. So I complain, and very shortly after that I get an email from the FBI, and apparently SocialGist had some agreement with the feds, and they were feeding data to the FBI and the FBI wanted me to hand over information on a user on an external server, information I did not have.

You can also see these other sites, there are "AI" companies using fedi to train their models, search engines building indexes, or people archiving all of it for undisclosed reasons that remain a mystery. What do they have? At least if there is a public archive, you can find out.

> Given the ability to opt-in to Mastodon posts being keyword searchable now, this has become more tractable.

It's a cruel joke. Gargrolon Mastodon is willing to sell a false sense of security for the sake of branding.
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