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.
Ton Zijlstra@djoerd I like search a lot but the location of where that search is possible matters. Full text search in social media disallows pseudo limited public conversations and creates damaging asymmetries. Unlike on a real public square where many conversations take place in a semipermeable setting and crashing one would immediately carry social consequences for the crasher, in social media that friction needs to be created. Search reduces friction in a way that favours the crashers.
@djoerd If a conversation wants to be findable using # is a way. Boosting is a more natural discovery tool mimicking how it would be on a proper public square. That said I do like search on anything I said , which I can.
@ton search on own posts and hash tags is fine.I like your town square analogy's social consequences analogy.
berkes 🐝 🚐 🏄 🌱@djoerd @ton leaves me wondering: if it is an artificial limitation,it would be easy to circumvent. It's not a limitation of the protocol, but of the client.
An instance could add search or a search tool. Then have their users (Ab)use that to bully, or simply inject themselves in conversations.
All that can be done, is defederate such instances when found out. And block users the misuse such tools.
Hence we should not rely on it for "security", which we currently do.
@berkes @djoerd I'm not sure we rely on it for security. There's never anything inherently private in a public space after all. I see it more as about aiming for friction that balances inherent asymmetries where disbalance favours toxicity. It's what we do offline too and what humans in groups are very good at, attaching a social cost to behaviour, in context and in minute increments even. Circumvention is always possible, but increases social cost to the point of defederation.
@ton @djoerd sure. But the fediverse isn't upping the costs of doing surveillance, it's lowering it.
E.g. each profile has a public RSS feed. But far more is public, in HTML, easily scrapable (courtesy of being accessible & microformats). We have relay servers that are essentially tapping systems (of public communication), etc. etc.
@berkes @djoerd I shouldn't have brought up the analogy. I wasn't making statements about surveillance but about friction. Everything in Mastodon, as on the web in general is public. Scraping etc unpreventable. None of that as such creates toxicity. It being easy or harder to get in my face with something is where upping the friction is a useful tactic as it is offline. Not a cure, just a tool.