#searchtodon — Public Fediverse posts

@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

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.

@mattwynne search in mastodon is awful by design . #searchtodon

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.

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.

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

"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 @janl 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

IMHO, Mastodon needs private timeline search, and this #Searchtodon experiment by @janl was very privacy-conscious: I'm sad to see it shut down.

What could be improved:
* move this feature in Mastodon, and make this available for everyone, by default.
* make this feature client-side; I don't know how feasible it would be, but I'm pretty sure the media cache of most clients would be smaller than a ~6 months full-text-search DB.

See also the longer-form essay from @timbray on Search: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-Privacy-and-Search

"...a retrospective post about my experiment Searchtodon, an attempt at building a privacy conscious personal timeline search tool for Mastodon."

#Searchtodon #Experiment

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

Some individual creates a _private_ fedi-search engine for content they follow for themselves in a thoughtful manner and a bunch of people fearing this will somehow result in targeted harassment indulge in ... a massive pile on of targeted harassment, name calling and generally boorish behavior. Nice community. #searchtodon

https://chaos.social/@janl/109698597934836246

re: #Searchtodon

no kidding, search here is so bad I've been asking #chatgpt to write a bulk downloader. Get rid of the centralized search facility and you will get a bunch of tools that do the same but with more people pulling down data to their own machine.

TIL about #Searchtodon experiment & (with it's closing) @janl excellent retrospective on it:

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

I wouldn't mind (1) ability to privately search my timeline for public things I missed (I already save/sync my personal #Mastodon posts on my own blog) and (2) Jan's last points - #Fediverse will only get bigger and for it's protection and of it's users a system where we can experiment safely. Just like Twitter's early days folks will build tools and play. #mastosearch

People on Mastodon who whine about indexing of their public posts are like Chris-Chan...

They want to be public figures with an audience and a global platform, with all the benefits and trappings thereof... But they also want to be 100% invisible to anybody they deem a troll. #searchtodon #mastosearch

@searchtodon

Any plans on writing up a summary of how the decision was made or what was learned in the process?

#searchtodon

#Searchtodon closing shows how difficult it's to do anything centralized in #Fediverse.

I think instances should enable searching if their community wants, you can't ask for the whole #Fediverse to agree. They never agree.

Searching already works in some servers, it should be opt-in by instances.

Some people think this is an ephemeral discussion and some think this is microblogging. I lean on the microblogging side, thus all content here should be "public" just like @leo wrote in the rules.

@cristianyxen Klar man muss auf jeden Fall den Willen der Leute respektieren. Aber mW hat doch #searchtodon genau das gemacht und das no-index flag berücksichtigt. Oder bin ich falsch informiert?

@promovicz Ok i think I’m missing a key piece of the puzzle. Wasn’t #searchtodon respecting the „no index“ flag of accounts? Or which license was broken?