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 @timbray
If we take "authors right to control" to the logical extreme, we'll find a need to include an Access Constraint or Rights Grant in each ActivityPub message.
For web pages, we've long used a robots.txt to control *who* may crawl a site and we've used page-specific"noindex" metatags, to control *what* may be done with crawled content. Does the SocialWeb need more granular control?
robots.txt: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/intro
noindex: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/block-indexing
@carnage4life @timbray
robots.txt and noindex only control one link in a potentially long chain of events. Should authors have control throughout the entire chain?
Example: For a dating app, a heterosexual woman may wish her profile to be indexed, but wishes that only men between given ages are able to view the indexed data. A bi-sexual woman may wish to control viewer's age but not their sex. In these cases, a "noindex" tag is too coarse.
Is there a boundary after which rights are exhausted?
Tim Bray
Dare Obasanjo
Bob Wyman