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Couldn’t somebody write a simple service that just scrapes profile info for following? Really doubt anyone would care if that aspect is centralized if it’s just

Couldn’t somebody write a simple service that just scrapes profile info for following? Really doubt anyone would care if that aspect is centralized if it’s just a UX improvement. Same with search, although you’ll always have a vocal minority angry that their public posts are being scraped.

piperswe 4y ago
> vocal minority angry that their public posts are being scraped That's the problem here: there have been scraping efforts before, but they always receive a tidal wave of community backlash.
- camjohnson26 4y ago
  There’s no legal issue though, and I think most users are willing to accept the tradeoff if it gives them search. The ones who it really bothers always have the option of joining a private instance. Unfortunately posting public data by definition always means somebody is going to do something with it that you don’t like, you can’t opt out of the world.
dnissley 4y ago
The issue is thinking that this is simply a bolt-on ux improvement when it's really a core part of the ux. Such a service would quickly rival the value of mastodon itself and soon overtake it. It might even eventually become what non-technical people refer to when they say "mastodon", kind of like how many older non-technical people think of google as "the internet".
- camjohnson26 4y ago
  I don’t know about that since it’d really just be a read only cache of public mastodon data. Account ids, follower counts, most recent posts, etc. but it wouldn’t support any of the write operations, you’d still need federation for that.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  So? Is it wrong for people to be happy?
HillRat 4y ago
The extreme backlash against this in the fediverse makes that approach a non-starter; you'll get defederated as soon as anyone realizes what's going on. Having said that, AP/Mastodon not only have poor search and discoverability experiences, but also suffer from serious performance issues relating to federation and fanout that can have outsized and unexpected effects on servers (or, in Mastodon's case, sites hosting URLs linked in posts, since every Mastodon server will repeatedly bash the site to create thumbnails from the URL). Bsky's core approach of making indexing and "algorithms" an explicit and decoupled part of the overall stack is the kind of thing that I think should make it into the fediverse, but I feel like the way the community works in that space means that either it ends up in Mastodon (which de facto sets the standards now) or in a working group that never ends up delivering anything.

piperswe 4y ago

> vocal minority angry that their public posts are being scraped That's the problem here: there have been scraping efforts before, but they always receive a tidal wave of community backlash.

camjohnson26 4y ago
There’s no legal issue though, and I think most users are willing to accept the tradeoff if it gives them search. The ones who it really bothers always have the option of joining a private instance. Unfortunately posting public data by definition always means somebody is going to do something with it that you don’t like, you can’t opt out of the world.

dnissley 4y ago

The issue is thinking that this is simply a bolt-on ux improvement when it's really a core part of the ux. Such a service would quickly rival the value of mastodon itself and soon overtake it. It might even eventually become what non-technical people refer to when they say "mastodon", kind of like how many older non-technical people think of google as "the internet".

camjohnson26 4y ago
I don’t know about that since it’d really just be a read only cache of public mastodon data. Account ids, follower counts, most recent posts, etc. but it wouldn’t support any of the write operations, you’d still need federation for that.
hgsgm 4y ago
So? Is it wrong for people to be happy?

HillRat 4y ago

The extreme backlash against this in the fediverse makes that approach a non-starter; you'll get defederated as soon as anyone realizes what's going on. Having said that, AP/Mastodon not only have poor search and discoverability experiences, but also suffer from serious performance issues relating to federation and fanout that can have outsized and unexpected effects on servers (or, in Mastodon's case, sites hosting URLs linked in posts, since every Mastodon server will repeatedly bash the site to create thumbnails from the URL). Bsky's core approach of making indexing and "algorithms" an explicit and decoupled part of the overall stack is the kind of thing that I think should make it into the fediverse, but I feel like the way the community works in that space means that either it ends up in Mastodon (which de facto sets the standards now) or in a working group that never ends up delivering anything.