@JamesGleick @ricmac @blaine I'd argue that the safety of those who have historically been targeted by trolls using such indexing trumps that.
Of course being instance-specific lessens the impact but also the usefulness.
But rather than bend Mastodon into something it’s not designed to be the better question is “is Mastodon the right place for such discourse?”. The answer might be “no”, which is absolutely ok.
The web is not short of platforms, you may find one better suits that use case.
@JamesGleick @ricmac @blaine mastodon does not need to be, nor is it trying to be, all things to all people.
It’s a big internet out there 😊
@wiredfire @JamesGleick @ricmac totally. The caveat is that the fediverse (not even just federated microblogging) isn't just Mastodon, and we'd all be worse off if Mastodon ended up consuming all the oxygen there.
The time of centralized online "platforms" is over; we need to think about ecosystems, instead.
Rather than trying to control everything everywhere all at once, I'd love to see us tackle the question:
How can we all live happily and together with emergent complexity?
@blaine @JamesGleick @ricmac agreed wholeheartedly. I only referred to Mastodon as the post above did, but you’re absolutely right that we need the fediverse to be more than Mastodon (in the same way we need web browsers to be more than Chrome / Blink / WebKit).
The more folk see that and start exploring the wider systems out there with excitement, instead of trying to make the one they’re on right now beaten to fit, the better 😁
@wiredfire @JamesGleick @ricmac @blaine
Exactly. No point building yet another platform/network, spexes based on a few hundred million people's comfort. Meanwhile around 7.5 billion potential users' critical needs would again be sidestepped.
"I would love for everyone to search in everything that I have tooted" = they have never been & are unlikely to become seriously bullied & have no marginalized near & dear = globally a minority.
@ronja @wiredfire @JamesGleick @ricmac I fully agree that we need to build networks that can adapt to the needs of *everyone*, not just the needs of rich white people.
That said, folks like @shengokai have been very vocal that things like QT are an important tool, culturally and liberationally, for (at the very least) Black people in America.
Similarly, white narratives have long overshadowed e.g. indigenous voices. "History is written by the victor" and all that.
@ronja @wiredfire @JamesGleick @ricmac @shengokai which is really just to say that *agency* is the important outcome here, *especially* for marginalized people who have historically been denied that.
In that sense, Mastodon's form being set (to use a gentle word) by a white European man is a real problem, even if he purports to speak for the wider "mastodon community."
I have faith we won't end up in that situation, though!
If and only if you figure out a way to 100% stop anyone, including global scale employers, child "protection" authorities in Texas, the police in Hungary, US antisemitist groups etc. from comparatively analyzing millions of posts. Then they can draw discriminatory, dangerous or just plain wrong conclusions about individuals of interest based on e.g. metadata: when they toot, how the length of their toots varies, where they appear to be tooting from...
TL;DR: if a feature can be used, including indirectly, for massive surveillance, for stalking an individual or group, or similarly harmfully, that feature should not exist.
@ronja I’m sincerely interested in this issue. I’m a Mastodon newbie. And I acknowledge that I’m a member of privileged groups that suffer less abuse.
Will you explain? If everyone has the ability to keep all their posts (or any, as they choose) invisible to search, how would the existence of the search feature make them vulnerable to stalking etc.?
@JamesGleick, forgive me for butting in. I’m a friend of @ronja ’s from way back on other platforms that were subject to persistent, abusive stalking and targeting of vulnerable people.
Say Alice runs excellent op sec so that Bob cannot stalk her and cannot search her posts, which are not indexed; all well and good. But Bob may have prior knowledge which may be able to establish Alice’s previous interests or connections, or provide a link to one of Alice’s friends or relatives, say, Carol.
@JamesGleick @ronja
Suppose that Carol doesn’t always think of protecting herself or others from stalkers; if Alice’s posts aren’t available to Bob, perhaps Bob will search through Carol’s posts which *are* indexed, for anything that might give him a clue about Alice.
Humans are social beings, so even if you’re targeted by abusive trolls, is the solution to go “deep stealth” and forgo all of your previous friendships and relationships just to avoid giving a clue to the trolls?
In some cases where there is a threat to life (e.g. domestic violence stalkers, overwhelmingly men) this is exactly what the targets do, and try to completely suppress all traces of their previous and current life.
So I do see a case for a platform like Mastodon giving the user control for what is searchable, with an opt-in model (use a hashtag if you want it to be searchable) rather than an opt-out model (if you don’t protect your posts then it gets indexed by default).
We know that trolls who become fixated on certain people go to incredibly elaborate lengths to search out every aspect of the victim’s life and try to exploit every possible weakness (either human failings, or technical) of the social systems we all deal with, to further harass and intimidate them. Online platforms like Twitter almost seem designed to help stalkers find their prey, rather than to prevent it. Anyway, that’s mostly what I wanted to say, besides: …
Thank you @xanthe_cat for taking the time to explain.
Did I ever tell you this back then?
During the siege that we experienced together, a senior member from the attackers' site sent me a message through non-public channels to tell that he had recognized my style of writing.
He basically wrote "I know it's you even though you have a different username." Considering that my abusive then-husband was also on his site, that sucked.
Hi @ronja, thank you – and no, I’m not sure you did tell me. Yuck. How incredibly creepy (after all this time I should *not* be surprised by anything that happened back then, but I always end up being slightly blindsided by how nasty some people can be). I’m also fairly certain I wasn’t aware that your ex was peripherally involved with that website. Double yuck.
Best solstice wishes from the summer climes to you and the family.
James, please read this. Cat Valente explains better than I can why so many of us multiply marginalized people are adamantly against features and policies that could lure fascists and/or commercial interests closer to our digital spaces.
TL;DR: It is impossible to extract vulgar capitalism style profits from genuine communities / inclusive public squares, and attempting to do so destroys the communities.
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start
And please read also this toot and the thread it spawned. Defending users and instances from wannabe abusers, be they individuals, 8chan troops or state-funded disinformation farms, is necessarily a pattern recognition task (among all the other subtasks), in my experience.
Content warning: Quote Retweet Meta, Never used Twitter, Discusses Abusers
@ronja @JamesGleick perhaps fedi gunk could have an export function that scrubs names? like people do with socmed screenshots they post to socmed.
we could standardise how to do that properly, making verifiable "stuff from someone" as the wider community.
@JamesGleick @ricmac @blaine Not sure why that isn't a per user or per post thing.
I could default to index and then flag some no index or vice versa. Then I get to choose how findable my content is.
@JoeCotellese @JamesGleick @ricmac @blaine I am sure we will get there. The influx of folks getting into Mastodon will (as explained in the interview) lead to investment into features.
(@mozilla is going to launch (well, test) a public instance soon - it that's not a turning point I don't know what is..)
@keithwilson @JamesGleick @ricmac @blaine
I was assuming OP meant searching inside Mastodon.
When I first tried Mastodon my impression was - "This is dumb, why can't I search for anything."
Now, I get why some in the community want to mask their content but not everyone does.
So when I was referring to letting me opt into / out of my posts showing up it was within some mythical Federated search engine.
I saw a post somewhere yesterday that public posts become searchable via Google.
On Google, you can enter:
site: instance keyword
to search an instance's public feed for a keyword. e.g.
site: sciencemastodon.com indexing
Far from perfect, and will always lag content by a while (until Google's crawlers find it), but potentially of use.
+1 and I think there is a lot of room for non-masto application categories that do interesting things with aggregation of activitypub-sourced content and indexes. It could allow you to eg create a river of news community that's basically links indexed from feeds based on topic etc.
@ricmac @blaine @redsage oh, wow. I really wish I’d been in closer contact with these guys fifteen years ago, when I first moved to the Bay.
I was deep into XMPP-pubsub at the time, while Blaine was pushing to decentralize Twitter with a similar protocol stack. It sounds like we’d have been intellectually simpatico.
Heck. Sounds like we’d get along today, too.
Wonderful article.
And I would love search. I'd kill for search. I've got my own little single instance server, and tried ElasticSearch, and it was ... bloat.
I envision keeping a long timeline since I find this shut a useful research nugget over time, and so I need search!
Allen Brunson
Richard MacManus
Edd Wilder-James
blaine
James Gleick
Wiredfire 
Ronja A-R (e/em/eir ; hen)
Caþerine X Cowie 
🍇stevoo🍇
suldrew 🚲🏳️🌈
Jason Levine
Joe Cotellese
Matt Matbox
CDunn
Keith Wilson
Marek McGann
Dredgen J
Fugue State Machine Moto
Futurist Jim Carroll
msgbi
Iron Bug
Toni Alatalo
Matt Hauger
ianjs
Mayank Gupta
Rick Mangi
Aron Fischer
Evan Prodromou
Aswath Rao
AnneCollier
Rob Blake