- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Lots of small improvements across the user experience, and opt-in search, make this an important release.
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opt-in search
This is what I don’t understand: When people mark a post as public and discoverable, meaning Google and Bing and such can already find and index it, why would one need to opt-in to making it available via Mastodon search? Isn’t that what Unlisted is already for?
Google and Bing’s crawlers can find and index Unlisted posts just as easily as any other.
Just because there are 3rd-party search engines that don’t respect people’s privacy, doesn’t mean that a 1st party search engine should follow their example.
Which privacy when it comes to posts explicitly tagged as public?
You’re conflating tagging a post as public so that it is publicly accessible as being the same thing as consenting to being indexed in a search engine.
And why wouldn’t this be the same thing? Public content is public content. 3rd party services can already access the posts.
The lack of an ability to prevent someone from doing something to you, without compromises on your part, is not the same thing as being okay with it being done to you.
3rd party services can access the posts, because the authors marked them as publicly accessible.
Those same 3rd party services can also index the posts in a search engine, but this is only because there is no feasible technological barrier to prevent them from doing so. If such an imaginary technology did exist, it would have been deployed already.
In the mean time, we can only count on a social solution, which is to merely signal our objections to search engine indexing, in the hope that maybe a law could be drafted that uses that as precedent to make indexing without consent illegal.
Here’s a question for you. Do you think it’s okay for Google or whoever to install invisible cameras everywhere in public spaces, that were explicitly for the purpose of collecting data to develop a facial recognition model to search people without their consent? Public space is public space …
Is it opt-out for performance reasons? If it was opt-in, maybe large instances will crumble.
Anyway, this is a wild guess.
It’s been awhile since I made a new account on a Mastodon instance, but is search engine indexing enabled by default? If it isn’t, then that would probably be part of why this is being made opt-in for Mastodon search, as there’s been a vocal portion of folks on Mastodon opposed to search across the board.
Even if search engine indexing was enabled by default, y’know those vocal folks probably disable it ASAP and would be making a fuss if this update went & enabled Mastodon search by default. Which, well, why post publicly at all if the concern’s related to privacy or not being bothered by internet randos, but 🤷♀️
as there’s been a vocal portion of folks on Mastodon opposed to search across the board.
Well, those can tag their posts as Unlisted.
You need to opt-in for your posts to show up in the new full-text search.
You need to opt-in for your posts to show up in the new full-text search.
I already wrote that. And what’s the point of tagging a post as public and then not being able to find it on Mastodon’s search? Public posts are indexable by Google and such already, no matter if the search opt-in checkbox was ticked or not.
This is opting in to Mastodon’s search, not third party search engines.
This is opting in to Mastodon’s search, not third party search engines.
Yes, that’s what I wrote. And my question is what the point is when all public posts are indexed by Google anyway.
You can opt-out of being indexed on search engines.
There’s also a really nice deep dive into the updates here.
You love to see it.
Hopefully search isn’t straight up broken and non functional anymore.
It really needs to be opt-out, but this is a good start.
I think forcing all posts to be opted-in to the search, and depending on users to opt-out, would be far more controversial? Either way, the user does get to control this within the platform.
I think forcing all posts to be opted-in to the search, and depending on users to opt-out, would be far more controversial?
Not all. The option is just about public ones anyway. Unlisted and private posts are not searchable. That’s why Unlisted and Private options for writing posts exist. Restricting search for PUBLIC posts makes no sense at all.
I love Mastadon. :D
