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 @ton Others may build different fediverse software, and we will block them, sure. But.. This is not about your usual "they got my password" security. It's about requirements engineering and social design: This software provides hash tag and account name search, but not full text search. Not all that can be done, should be done.