shy π½
Eugen RochkoIf text search is ever implemented, it should be limited to your home timeline/mentions only. Lack of full-text search on general content is intentional, due to negative social dynamics of it in other networks
I can't stop google from indexing public pages but there's a difference between "possible" and "convenient". There's already hashtags for when you *want* to be discovered via some keyword.
Matt Cropp π²π²@Gargron though getting people aware of the importance of using hashtags is a cultural shift, as people are used to full-text search... https://social.coop/media/ylUSqt-ktVlOJHhpuiU
fenarinarsa 
@Gargron Hashtags are so 2007 and people don't expect the search to work only on hashtags :/
Florian@Gargron especially since I seem to vaguely remember from previous jobs that Google has a habit of ignoring robots.txt telling it to go away
ππΈπ»πΆπͺπ·π½ π»π»πͺ π‘ π°οΈ@Gargron it would be nice if it would be possible to 'follow' hashtags so they'd appear in your 'Home'. a bit like diaspora did. great way to discover content without having to manually search it out.
Trolli Schmittlauch π¦₯@Gargron Hashtags not working accross instances is not intentional but "not yet implemented" though, isn't it?
lertsenem@Gargron I get what you mean, and I do not disagree. But whatever you choose to do, if it's "possible" we are only one-person-coding-a-script away from "convenient".
SEALIRL@Gargron what's wrong with robots.txt?
Maiyannah Bishop
β¦Ί irick ππβ©@animeirl @Gargron
Well.
https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/
TL;DR: Robots.txt may work for google but people are free to interpret their purpose as they see fit.
Well.
https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/
TL;DR: Robots.txt may work for google but people are free to interpret their purpose as they see fit.
cigazze@Gargron giving users the option to have a robots.txt apply to their page should be possible i'd think
tSatty@Gargron agreed. too bad there's already someone running a full text search engine :/
phryk π΄@Gargron Thanks for clarifying. :)
Sandro Hawke@Gargron I respectfully disagree. Users should be allowed to have public information when they want it (and choose to go past content warnings), even if someone thinks it's unpleasant or problematic.
@Gargron and in practice, how can you stop broader search from being implemented by someone in an open system? If users want it, someone will provide it.
@Gargron and just to link it here, I've opened an activitypub issue on this: https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/221
Daniel Appelquist@sandhawke @Gargron should it be up to the instance provider to decide whether their instance participates in any global search? That way instances (for example, ones specialising in marginalised communities) can keep their content private?
@torgo @Gargron that makes sense as a default, but should users be able to change it? And is the setting advisory, so bad actors can ignore it, or is it enforced, and if so how, given that it might be boosted, or maybe someday forwarded or quoted? See https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/221
Chris@Gargron I could see text search of mentions being incredibly useful -- text search of the home timeline could still be pretty easily abused by followbots though
Scott Reuter@Gargron As a person who listens on social media to help people during disasters, I'm sad to hear that. If that is true, I hope you would add instance server location to the instance database so that digital humanitarians can try to listen for people sharing disaster info, needs, requests for assistance, etc...
jansegersEuh, @Gargron ,
not if ...
it already has been done ...
It is limited to public toots, but that's about it ...
toot ! π
and talking about negative social dynamics...
I'm afraid the entire GinnyMcQueen harassment story is proof Mastodon can't be the promised safe Heaven it appeared to aim at...
It is not that no-one did try to help her out, but it seems to be more complex to address the problem than the volunteers could anticipate...
I hope that now she has started her own instance, she can rain in the negativity the way she likes...
toot ! π
Craig Wright π΅@Gargron This might be worth a blog post or patreon post, I think it needs a long-form justification. I am interested what you are thinking here, and how this solves problems of abuse.
Lew Perin@Gargron What about a per-toot option of βsure, go ahead and index thisβ?
This isnβt abstract to me β some of the things Iβm interested in are never mentioned on the home timeline of my small instance. Itβs *very* hard to find people on Mastodon to talk about these topics with.
jd βΆβ
πΌπππͺπΊππΊ@Gargron If I was the peeps at #DuckDuckGo I would jump into #Mastodon *now* and make a search engine for it. They could contribute to the community while also promote themselves, it would be a perfect win-win for them.
Damien Clauzel@Gargron You cannot prevent an admin to crawl and index everything that goes through his instance.
Jeremiah "CaptainKraft" Goerdt@Gargron Suppressing "negative social dynamics" sounds a lot like censorship. It's silly not to have a feature that people want. Search is extremely valuable for many reasons.
Kevin Marks@Gargron isn't the negative dynamic the primacy of @ replies rather than the search?
Lyn@Gargron and then we wonder why decentralized social media has struggled to take off for half a decade. It's a pretty poor decision to limit our ability to actually find and interact with each other.
Jeremy@Gargron Thank you for keeping it this way, not letting the trolls get their troll searching.
Chris Messina@Gargron I completely disagree.
Ben O'Steen@chrismessina trolls and harassers using full text search to parachute into conversations they aren't wanted, and to find new targets to harass is real, and now common on twitter. My experience of being targeted like this is shared by others. If you completely disagree, what safeguards do you think will be needed that have not been considered yet to make your vision of full text search useful but not abused?
Andre Duarte@Gargron strongly disagree. The search is incredibly useful during catastrophes, and live events. And the safeguard to avoid the problem you mention is already in place: the tweet can be made available only to followers.
@Gargron another important use case is searching for the name of your own brand/product/company to help your customers, gather feedback, analyse sentiment, etc
Hughster@andreduarte People can use a common hashtag for live event updates or to talk about a brand/product/company easily enough.
Jan Lehnardt ποΈ@Gargron Heya, just leaving this here for folks looking for prior art, Iβve built a beta that does exactly this: https://chaos.social/@janl/109677140991445140 <3
Jan Lehnardt ποΈ (@[email protected])
Hi everybody, Iβm ready to unveil my year-end-holiday-hack project: Meet Searchtodon: ***Private*** Timeline Search for Mastodon It fills a gap that I have been missing over on Twitter as well: βI remember seeing this THING, where was that again?β It is built with privacy and consent in mind (pls see the FAQ), but is also *an experiment* to see if something like this is accepted by the larger Mastodon community. Here goes: https://searchtodon.social
@janl Iβm curious what is the difference between this and what we do have in Mastodon?
@Gargron as far as I can tell, I can not search over the contents of the posts that I read in my timeline in regular mastodon?
@Gargron Also, just adding this for you: Iβm not trying to compete or set up a central post repository or anything. If anything, Iβd love to inform how timeline search can be done in Mastodon without making it a big thing of trying to include it into the main distribution just yet.
Hit me up any time if this is of interest to you and/or your team.
Jay π