6 ms·

The idea is that a search feature leads to harassment or spam. You could, for example, search for your favorite politician's name and hurl insults at anyone who

• int_19h 4y ago
  It's not that it's a wrong stance per se. But the notion that you can ward the truly malicious actors from indexing content that you yourself made public by saying that you don't want them to is kinda ridiculous.
  • kelseyfrog 4y ago
    There's a world where a full-text-search-disabling mastodon content license has legal teeth and the enforcement comes down to employing the justice system. I admit this isn't terribly likely, but it isn't categorically ruled out. I suppose it comes down to where we draw lines on maliciousness and court effectiveness, but there's still interesting things to territorialize in that space.
    • wmf 4y ago
      I'm going to predict that the Mastodon people believe that the legal system can't be used for good and thus they're not willing to use it.
      • kelseyfrog 4y ago
        Mastodon people is sort of a strange way to group folks. Categorically I don't think it's useful other than speaking in tendencies. I brought this up because I specifically run my own server and I license my content in a way that prohibits its indexing for full-text search. Am I a "Mastodon people"? Who can say for sure.
        • int_19h 4y ago
          Do you require the license to be read and accepted before providing access to servers trying to federate?
          • kelseyfrog 4y ago
            I provide it on my profile. I don't require the license in my Github repos to be read and accepted before it applies to the code therein and this is a parallel. The license strictly prohibits indexing for full text search and quote replies. All other indexing, storage, and retrieval is allowed.
            • int_19h 4y ago
              I don't think one needs to agree to your GitHub license to browse the repo, though. Copying it is another matter, but indexing doesn't do that.
              • kelseyfrog 4y ago
                At the end of the day what matters is what a judge believes. Maybe it's not legally possible to create a license that prohibits full-text search, but I'm not going to give up before trying.
        • Karrot_Kream 4y ago
          While there is certainly nuance in Fediverse communities, I think the idea of "Mastodon people" has merit. Many people on Mastodon have strongly held political and cultural opinions and strong feelings on the types of ideas their conversation partners should have. Deviation from these opinions is usually met with derision at best but more generally vitriol and banning. It sounds like the OP ran against exactly this behavior. Over the years there's certainly been a rise in interest oriented communities, but even those come with strongly held cultural and political opinions. My experience comes from using Mastodon from 2015-2018 (where I got to witness the free speech instance wars) and ultimately distancing myself from it.
  • mcv 4y ago
    If you really want to control who can access it, you need to encrypt it with the public keys of everybody who is allowed to read it. That's probably the only way. I don't think Mastodon or anything else on the Fediverse currently uses public key encryption at all, though.
    • skybrian 4y ago
      You also need to verify anyone who joins the group. Allow strangers to join and the encryption doesn't do anything. Might as well use a private group on Signal at that point.
      • mcv 4y ago
        Encryption still encrypts, doesn't it? Of course they could decrypt it and pass it on decrypted, but no amount of security is going to prevent that. Google Plus had the option of sharing publicly, with a specific circle, with all your circles, or with your extended circles (your circles and their circles). This gave very good granularity in controlling who could read what. It sounds like some people at Mastodon could really use something similar, and the only way to accomplish that on an open, federated network, is through encryption. Though it may be a bit much to encrypt it separately for 100 different people. It really blows up the overhead. So maybe don't encrypt the entire message with publish keys, but with a secret key, which gets encrypted with each public key of the allowed recipients, all of them attached with the same message. Still some overhead, but a lot less. I don't know ActivityPub well enough to know if they already have something like this, but it might be a useful addition.
        • skybrian 4y ago
          One issue is that other Mastodon servers would need to decrypt the messages if any of their users is a member of a private group. Furthermore, users can switch servers, which effectively means that any server they can move to could get access. If you want end-to-end encryption then the key management needs to be on the client and the client software needs to be securely distributed, which makes it more like a mobile or desktop app than a web app.
• hgsgm 4y ago
  There's a simple, ancient solution to avoid receiving hurled insults: don't read comments from stangers, and share blocklists with your friends.