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> I got dozens of death threats when I built an AP search Do you have any idea why? conspirologist in me says, this could be targeted attack by FB, Twitter to

• sneak 6y ago
  Some people think that they can publish information to the unauthenticated web and simultaneously have that information remain, in some sense, under their own control. This belief is false. There is a desire to be able to sort of soft-publish, accessible to the whole internet, but revocable in some way. That's not how publishing works from an information-theoretical standpoint, to say nothing of the internet. A lot of people thought their data was being stolen or misappropriated when their own servers provided it to me via unauthenticated vanilla HTTP requests to public URLs. It sometimes occurs to me that if search engines didn't exist, and you tried to invent them today, profiting off of a downloaded copy of the full text of other people's websites, you would be sued into oblivion.
• thejohnconway 6y ago
  From what I've been reading, a there is a large contingent in the Fediverse that is against people being easily found. This is due to fears of of harassment and stalking. I think this is not a sustainable view. It is trivial to write a crawler to find people's profiles using open APIs, and even more could be garnered if you scrape pages. If you don't want to be found but must put stuff on the internet, the answer is to not federate.