Every post in the #fediverse that isn't public should be encrypted. This should be the default, so that to post publicly, a person has to know what they're doing and turn it off. That way, anyone who wants to build search and discovery tools for public posts can do so without permission, or fear of retribution.
Discuss.
@Matt5sean3
IMHO public = public. The only reason it's a problem right now is that the boundaries between public and private posts are unclear, and a lot of people don't realize they're publishing to the web. If anyone had said in the 1990s that ...
> Creating open season on analysis of public websites culturally would still be a step in a potentially very dangerous direction for the web
... they would have been laughed off the internet, and so they should.
We're not in the '90s anymore and there was never a culture of opposing such analysis of websites.
People know they're publishing to the web. They knew they were posting in public when they were on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and every other platform before.
Posts getting used to build a profile of a person was the cost of using the platform. It need not be the cost here. There are people who came here to get away from that, but still want to be able to reach new people.
@Matt5sean3
> There are people who came here to get away from that, but still want to be able to reach new people
Fair enough. I want to be invisible and still have people tell me I look sexy. Sadly, I can't have both.
You can have privacy or you can have reach. You can't have both *in the same post*. But you can have a UI that makes it easy to choose which one you want - per account or per post - and a back-end that reliably enforces those choices.
@Matt5sean3
> We're not in the '90s anymore
Fediverse development and adoption is at roughly the same stage the web was in the 90s.
> there was never a culture of opposing such analysis of websites
That's my point.
The world is not in the 90s anymore. The tools and techniques to build a virtual panopticon did not exist in the '90s. The degree of adoption and development of the Fediverse are irrelevant to this.
Strypey
Matt5sean3