I think people who don't want search are underestimating how prevalent it already is. Mastodon itself officially supports Elasticsearch, but it isn't turned on

I think people who don't want search are underestimating how prevalent it already is. Mastodon itself officially supports Elasticsearch, but it isn't turned on by default and the UI limits what can be searched. I'm not sure if that's for social reasons or just to make installing a server easier, but there's no "never federate to servers with ES enabled" setting. Friendica has full-text search as well, and I imagine there are others. Machine-readable copyright licenses as the author suggests could be very useful for situations where legitimate for-profit companies start federating their services. Perhaps I don't want Flickr[0] to show advertisements next to my photos that I share from a self-hosted Mastodon server, for example. I could apply a license that forbids that and have a good chance of enforcing it in court. They're not a good fit for dealing with bad actors though. If somebody sets up fedisearch.ru fed by legitimate-looking public servers, they're probably beyond the reach of the courts I have access to. [0] The CEO of Flickr has publicly pondered adding ActivityPub support.