Thinking about how to enable full-text searching of a useful subset of Fediverse posts in a way that is controlled by post authors and has humane unsurprising defaults.

The current yes/no binary toggle under Settings/Other (that most people have never seen) probably isn't going to do the job.

The problem needs a long-form write-up (coming), and is controversial, but I’m pretty sure won’t go away, so the community should get in front of it.

@timbray This sounds to me like the social graph interoperability debate and how classic web ideas clash with modern ideas around privacy.

Regardless of how useful it is to others, people have the right to opt out of their data being used. The GDPR effectively bans social graph interoperability between services given this principle. Mastodon seems to ignore this which is itself interesting.

The same philosophy should apply to being able to search people’s content.

@carnage4life

>> people have the right to opt out of their data being used.

Agreed. I need to make sure I’m clear on that.

>> The GDPR effectively bans social graph interoperability between services

Huh? More please?

@timbray @carnage4life third condition here https://iapp.org/media/pdf/resource_center/WP29-2017-04-data-portability-guidance.pdf it’s pretty muddy, but the takeaway appears to be that you can bring over attributes of third parties automatically in a social graph, but in order to use them (particularly if building entities into a graph, but I think one could argue that creating an search index is infringing use of the data) then you need the third parties’ permission.