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!

fluffel Jan 14, 2023

@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”.

@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 🤷🏻‍♂️

Jan Lehnardt 🛋️

@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.