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.
Cleo of Topless Topics@djoerd that's what I'd assume, but it also makes it ridiculously hard to find people who DO talk about stuff you're interested in. If you could look within an instance without having to join it, that would be lovely... Not like requiring someone to sign up to see it alone stops abuse, they could always lurk then use their other account to abuse