@jer no, but I know how to find the post that showed you this, but the mob doesn’t let me #Searchtodon 😂

By reading the end of the #searchtodon ´s adventures, I discovered that @ivory was able to filter your timeline hiding #boost and #replies . Much better to find what really interest you in your timeline.

https://searchtodon.social/Adventures-in-Mastoland.html

By reading the end of the #searchtodon ´s adventures, I discovered that @ivory was able to filter your timeline hiding #boost and #replies . Much better to find what really interest you in your timeline.

https://searchtodon.social/Adventures-in-Mastoland.html

Here are some rabid nitwits fighting (rather innocent) indexers that offer privacy sensitive services to the fediverse. Bullying the developers, until those give up. Like #searchtodon beaten to submission.

There are large CDN providers offering "help" to the fediverse. "Help", that could land them in a position where they process all fediverse data. To be indexed at their leisure.

Now. If you so insist on picking a fight, which one to pick? I have no idea. Oh, wait. I do.

@redgreen925

In the #Searchtodon example. A developer took the time to:

1) Post the problem he was trying to solve.
2) Acknowledge that there was likely to be concerns.
3) Offer to remove the service if the community objected to it.
4) Asked for feedback.

Lot's of people gave him constructive feedback, but a significant enough group of folks challenged his intentions, accused him of being disingenious, and attacked his project - without, I believe, fully understanding what was proposed.

@davidgerard

I start almost all my statements with opinion qualifiers. I rarely assume I that I am privey to the absolute truth on almost anything.

I gave you my opinion, based upon following the #Searchtodon announcement (I read a lot of the replies to it) and this retrospective.

https://searchtodon.social/Adventures-in-Mastoland.html

@roadriverrail @darius

Unfortunately, I don't think the #Searchtodon incident will prevent developers from contining to develop search tools. I think it's inevitable.

But, I think that well intentioned developers will be less likely to try and come up with a responsible tools that address community concerns, while others will proceed quietly to do it without community input and/or consideration of the real concerns around search.

@darius @roadriverrail

I agree. I was not involved and do not know the people directly involved.

I also think it was misunderstood and an opportunity was missed.

I appreciated the developers attempt and his documentation of what went wrong and how it might be improved in future atttempts.

Sure, there is a lot developers can do in the Fediverse that would be welcomed.

But, I think that the #Searchtodon incident sent an unfortunate message to developers.

@roadriverrail @darius

In my opinion, #Searchtodon was treated as if it was Surveillance Capitalism because it had the term "search" in it. All indications were that the developer was trying very hard to address the concerns of the community, while also providing a feature that lots of people do want.

I believe that many folks dismissed the idea as Surveillance Capitalism, without really looking at what it was or what the developer was trying to do.

I'm still thinking about Jan Lachauer's #Searchtodon experiment and how people reacted to it. People on Mastodon seem to be much more aware of data ownership, which is good.

However, it also seems to me some people aren‘t aware that by design, Mastodon is an open medium. Posts have a public URL, which is great for linking to it, mentioning it in other media, and so on. But it also means that technically everyone can access it from anywhere on the Internet.

@Parasite Oh yeah, full-text search here is not going to happen, ever. For recent cases, look at the #searchtodon hashtag. @inquiline

Reading more on search with #Mastodon. After reading about #Searchtodon and @anildash lastest piece I then read this one from @ben on his $0.02 and efforts to build a bot to detect scrapers.

I'm still forming my opinions (maybe more on that later) but Ben covers a few corners of the discussion I haven't seen brought up yet.

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/autodetecting-and-outing-mastodon-scrapers-with-scrapersnitchbot.html

#Fedisearch

@phneutral

Yes, I think that those were the recommendations.

However, it's my understanding that there is nothing preventing anyone from implementing a search system that that does not do these things.

If we are not willing to work with someone like the creator of #Searchtodon, who I think was making a sincere effort to listen and respond to the community, then someone else will simply implement a tool on their own without consultation of the community and without the protections discussed.

So greatful to the creator of #Searchtodon for taking the time to write such a thoughful summary of what he learned.

"There is a difference between what a thing is vs. what people perceive that thing to be. For success, it is important for whoever makes the thing to respect both of these positions."

@atomicpoet @JessTheUnstill @pre

#Searchtodon was, I think, trying to do this is in a responsible way. But, community backlash shut that effort down.

I don't see how we prevent the less ethical actors from following through and the results will be even worse.

@hko or maybe you meant that I could, for example, build my own version of #searchtodon and just not put it out publicly but still be indexing data in the same way? Also true, and as far as nefarious actors go this is the real threat.

@hko Absolutely—but only if that data is marked as such. I think the thrust of what the article at #searchtodon was getting at was that we need far better ways of indicating these things in the fediverse; the point I'm trying to get at is that people have unreasonable expectations that social conventions are going to be followed in precisely the same manner (or even at all) all over a technosphere.

I had an idea to build a dual Twitter + Mastodon Mac client, but honestly I've lost interest at this point, after seeing the #searchtodon drama over the weekend… because a big part of that was supposed to be a feature to let you locally search the archive of your timeline. And just for mentioning that I've already been quoted as "a techbro who says he's planning to build a fedi scraper". I don't have the mental strength to handle this kind of backlash that Jan received.

Did you hear about the experimental #Searchtodon?

Which was an attempt at building a #privacy conscious personal timeline search tool for Mastodon

There is a #retrospective post from the developer who details lessons learned, errors made and possible updates.

Last updated 2023-01-16.

https://searchtodon.social/Adventures-in-Mastoland.html

My gut feelings so far range to "it's worth a try!' and 'better than nothing' on this but read @anildash proposal for a #Fediverse search (with a focus on "consent") yourself as I think it's worth a read:

https://anildash.com/2023/01/16/a-fediverse-search/ #Mastosearch #Searchtodon