@Schaf
> What were the reasons why people complained?
It is mostly a cultural thing. Mastodon users and admins have always been against such a service, various sources can be found on that topic, including mastodon's GitHub.
The backlash mostly came from admins, some of them sending insults and dead threat, both to us and our instance admin.
@Schaf
> What were the reasons why people complained?
Our instance admin backed down and kicked us from their instance ( infosec.exchange ) based on the threat of being excluded from the Mastodon fediverse, a risk they couldn't take.
We understand the decision and stand by them, we are however really disappointed with the behavior of the other admins who were responsible for protecting, or at least informing their users.
@Schaf
> What did you do to comply their requests or limit your power?
The list of measure we took is listed at https://fedsearch.io/privacy.
We always respected the user/admin choices by honoring the optin/optout feature exposed on each profile page.
The default behavior (optin vs optout) is a choice the instance admin has to make that reflects on the user's default profile settings.
@Schaf
> What did you do to comply their requests or limit your power?
We suspect most of them ( especialy the complaining ones ) did not know about this.
The delete process was implemented right away. The #RemoveMyContentFromSearchEngines delete tag was implemented a day later after release.
We also provided the community with an opensource copy of the indexing code for auditing at https://github.com/LeakIX/mastosearch.
@Schaf
> What do you think about other likewise projects that still exist in the unknown without opt-out options?
It would obviously be in one's best interest to keep such project private and potentially sell the access to intelligence companies.
Sadly the handling of the issue by the network admins, again despite the measures put in place to optin/optout in the mastodon software, has made that point painfully clear and has probably resulted in such practices without future user consents.
leakix