Richard MacManusMy interview with @blaine, who was there at the very beginning of Twitter; now he's focused on building #fediverse infrastructure that will help #Mastodon scale. https://thenewstack.io/why-a-twitter-founding-engineer-is-now-all-in-on-mastodon/
James Gleick
Wiredfire 
@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.
Ronja A-R (e/em/eir ; hen)@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.
blaine@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!
@ronja How about, “I would love for everyone to decide whether their posts can be searchable or not”? (And change their minds for any particular post.) Wouldn’t that work?
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.?
Caþerine X Cowie 
@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: …
@JamesGleick @ronja Thanks for your books. When I was starting my undergraduate degree in physics, Chaos had come out the previous year and it was pretty much the hottest book circulating through the science/maths community, not merely for the subject matter but also the wonderful narrative pictures of the scientists piecing together the new science. I think my copy was more often loaned out for others to read than sitting on my shelves.
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.
Merlin Star (any pronoun) (@[email protected])
Content warning: Quote Retweet Meta, Never used Twitter, Discusses Abusers
🍇stevoo🍇@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.
@ronja @JamesGleick because there is some beautiful writing in here...