Mastodawn

As promised, here’s an update on Searchtodon.

I have shut it down & deleted all data (as of 14:06 CET today).

As implemented, it does not gel *with* the Mastodon community, although the functionality did prove useful to a lot of people.

I’m working on a retrospective that hopefully can inform future experimenters.

Thanks everybody for giving it a try and for all your constructive feedback!

@janl I really hope a feature like this ends up in Mastodon itself or in the clients though.

Without excessive bookmarking of every post that seems even remotely relevant (which ultimately defeats the purpose) I never find anything on here ever again, as soon as it‘s more than a day or two in the past. :(

@fluffel @janl I have a vague plan/idea to build something for Mastodon for the Mac and would love to add such feature at some point there, so I'm watching this discussion carefully also for this reason…

Native apps kind of by definition keep some kind of cache/database of loaded posts in order to display them, so I don't think adding a search for that local db would make it a very different thing?

@mackuba @fluffel that would still violate the TOS of instances that forbid archiving data e.g. https://meta.chaos.social/terms — and there is no automated way of discovering that for all your followees.

@janl @fluffel What is "archiving" really? Is it about search, or about storing on disk and not in memory, or about not pruning the stored records? Or keeping a too large cache? Is it possible to define this?

Because if you disallow *any* saving to disk, then an iOS app restarted after being evicted from memory (basically after every app switch on my low-RAM iPhone 8) has to show a blank page before it reloads everything. That's bad UX, every app like this keeps some data between restarts.

@mackuba @fluffel that will have to be discussed. The limit will be somewhere between “cache the current state” and “store everything and go back forever”.

Kuba Suder

@janl @fluffel Also, I realize this is going to be a risky question, but does chaos.social have a right to say what I can do with the content I'm fetching for my timeline from *my* instance? I don't interact with chaos.social directly in any way, only with my instance's server. This is no longer "content on that instance"...

It would be kind of like sending emails that say in the footer that you don't have a right to keep the received emails in your GMail archive. It's my GMail archive 🤷🏻‍♂️

@mackuba I would encourage you to not find loopholes, but ways to make this work with the community that you are aiming to serve.

@janl Providing a feature that would be useful to a lot of people who are missing it now is also serving the community, just a different part of it. The problem is that the needs of one part of the community are in opposition to the needs of another part of the community… You can't satisfy both completely at the same time.

@mackuba you also can’t be an asshole about it.

@mackuba not saying you are, I just don’t recommend going there

@mackuba @janl first: I have no idea & usually hate thinking about "legal" stuff like that. But I think a more fitting metaphor would be: I send you an email with some copyrighted text or image in it. I don't think the location of where it's stored would be _the_ problem, but the level of publicity. If it's in _your_ Gmail archive it's probably fine, but when you put it on a public screen without telling the author it probably isn't anymore. But again, no lawyer and no idea what's "right" here.

@fluffel @janl That's more or less how I see it - you should have a right to keep a private archive of things you've seen, whether that's screenshotting an SMS, keeping an email in a GMail archive, or saving a website to HTML with "Save as". No one can really stop you, you always can do this technically. Pretending you can stop this is like disabling right-click on websites so that people can't save a picture to use as their desktop wallpaper.

@mackuba @fluffel “no one can stop you” is one hell of an assertion. You’ll be surprised.

@janl @fluffel can anyone stop me from silently keeping all JSON responses I get from my.instance.social /api/v1/timelines/home?

@mackuba @fluffel you are starting to advertise that you are planning to behave like an asshole. I do not recommend it.

@mackuba @janl probably not, but that's also a little like saying "can anyone stop me from photographing my neighboors every day?!!" no they can't, at least until they realize it and then you have a problem in both cases I guess

@fluffel @janl Fair enough, thanks for the warning - I just see these two things as nowhere near each other. More like the GMail archive mentioned before - I'm not coming to someone to record them in a private context, I'm talking about keeping something that was sent to me.

I don't think I'm going to change my mind, but I acknowledge that a lot of people see this differently and can react very badly to such feature. Which honestly makes me less interested in building tools for Mastodon at all…

@mackuba I recommend you read through all the comments my original post has received. I think building tools despite people discouraging you is not gonna work for anybody. You will have to find a way to work with them.

@mackuba @janl ok maybe my metaphor wasn‘t great, I give you that.
Maybe more like: Let‘s say you‘re at a public event and have a little, hidden recording-device that collects all the conversations someone is having with and around you.

@fluffel @janl That would be creepy, yeah. But I think there are very different expectations between recording real life vs. online and especially text…

Recording people in the street = creepy.
Recording all Facetime calls = creepy.
But: keeping an archive of iMessage, Messenger conversations = not creepy (these apps do this automatically!), as long as you don't share those private conversations publicly.
Saving a page with a thread on e.g. MacRumors forum that you've posted in = not creepy.

Ben ✌️Jan 14, 2023

@mackuba @fluffel @janl I'm not sure that a notice on a website saying 'you can't archive us' is particularly enforceable.

The nature of the protocol is that messages are pushed, not pulled. A contract has 'offer, acceptance, consideration'. If they push messages to my activitypub inbox, there's no contract, and unless each message has its own clear terms, I doubt there's a contract. As opposed to scraping a website for content where terms are actually visible.

But hey, I'm not a lawyer.

Ben ✌️Jan 14, 2023

n.b. To be clear, I'm not advocating violating clearly expressed wishes.

Just making the point that it seems weak to rely on from a legal perspective.

@mackuba @janl I don't think it's that easy.

Would a device that transcribes those conversations and only saves the text be ok, just because it isn't audio anymore?

Many people don't make the distinction between real life and online, because what's not real about us talking here right now?

Messenger archives are probably "ok" for most people, because those are explicitly started conversations that are either 1 on 1 or small-ish group chats so there's more trust involved.

It's complicated.

@fluffel @janl It is complicated… But I think my point is: when posting in a public forum on the Internet, people have a lower expectation of privacy than in a private conversation. They are aware (though not always thinking about it) that everything they post can potentially be seen by the whole world.

Us talking here is not like talking in a street in a crowd that ignores us, more like talking in the hall at a conference, where we can be overheard by anyone, maybe even randomly recorded.

@mackuba @janl But the fact that it's prohibited by default to be recorded or even photographed at for example CCC events is one of the things I really like about them.

Not everyone thinks about those places we all inhabit online in the same way.

In the end it's a social problem, that we can only solve together by negotiating what's acceptable as a community and that will take time, failures and a lot of nerves. But if we get this right I'm sure it can be glorious in the end! :)

@mackuba @janl "you should have a right to keep a private archive of things you've seen"

Easy Counter Example: Google Glass