Teddy
myrmepropagandist@vedmid I'm going to also share this as I think I've got it right... but it's complex.
It's not possible to hide everything. That kind of goes against the ethos of a public social media. But you can make it annoying for various parties to see?
Ada@futurebird @vedmid That's where authorised fetch comes in. Authorised fetch means that content from your instance won't federate to an instance that your instance has blocked. However, anyone anywhere can still see your public content via your instances web interface and probably also by a customised web search, though these are also features that can be disabled, the former by an admin the latter by a user
Also the search function is an interesting point, and might even not that trivial.
Is the simple searchability option as implemented today sufficient to fulfil the user’s demand?
Is authorisation really respect by each today’s or future search function?
@vedmid @futurebird Authorised fetch works because it requires authentication on the instance side to federate content and so no content goes to blocked servers. They can always scrape the content etc, but simple federation isn't an option.
As for the search, I was referring to Google etc. You can use a site specific search on Google to basically get a full text search of public content. But, with authorised fetch, even though they can see it in a search, they can't federate it to their server to reply or harass.
As for the search, I was referring to Google etc. You can use a site specific search on Google to basically get a full text search of public content. But, with authorised fetch, even though they can see it in a search, they can't federate it to their server to reply or harass.
point 1: Works reliably as long as the authorisation is respected and cannot be bypassed. “Serious” search engines (never thought to ever group Google here 😁) may respect the authorisation fixed in robot.txt for example. Others may not.
point 2: The today’s mastodon settings might not be sufficient. I still couldn’t find any setting to get found at Mastodon but not at Google.
@vedmid @futurebird Authorisation comes from your instance. It can't be forced from the blocked side. There are other work arounds, but none of them involve your content federating to a blocked server. They involve scraping, 3rd party searches etc.
In short there is nothing to completely stop public posts from being found. There will always be a way. As was said earlier, the goal is to just make it more inconvenient for problem instances to do so.
In short there is nothing to completely stop public posts from being found. There will always be a way. As was said earlier, the goal is to just make it more inconvenient for problem instances to do so.