Djoerd Hiemstra 🍉I love Mastodon and I research search engines, so when we set up a mastodon instance at the University of Twente, we planned to research federated search, who-to-follow recommendations, and trending topics. Students worked on this in one of our courses:
When engaging with the community, I quickly learnt that many tooters actively oppose search, recommendation and most other "algorithmic" tools. As a researcher in Information Retrieval I was kind of shocked: How could someone NOT like search??
Turns out, search can be easily misused to find persons to harass, searching for instance for "trans rights are human rights" and threaten all those persons is way to easy. Who-to-follow recommendations will then give the trolls more people to harass, as do trending topics. The lack of full-text search is a feature, not a bug or an omission.
Philip KALUĐERČIĆ@djoerd I get the argument, but it does sound like an “excuse” to tackle a difficult problem. The feature could can be abused, but it would also be helpful to find an old post you didn’t save or other people who share common interests.
IMO one should be open and honest about the shortcomings of decentralisation (it might be a net gain, but it has a cost), instead of trying to making a vice into a virtue.