@lauren It's a bit disingenuous to call it "by design" as if it's meant to have low intake. If you followed the issue @Gargron's first instinct was to enable it by default, but they talked him to use opt-in. So it definitely was not "by design".

I don't mind it being opt-in, Mastodon is a pretty small network and new users will come.

I do wonder how other servers deal with it, like Threads. It would be painful if their content is not searchable because of the new option they don't use.

@lauren Yes, I might have misunderstood your sentiment. But what I meant it's not designed to have "low intake", it's a consequence of it being opt-in.

I would wager it has pretty high intake once Mastodon 4.2 is prevalent enough.

@lauren @Ciantic I agree.

I think providing choice — also a Mastodon hallmark — is good, but this being opt-in instead of opt-out will almost certainly greatly curtail the usefulness of the feature in practice.

And that’s on top of the already deleterious fact that it will only search posts that your instance already knows about.

@jeff @lauren @Ciantic Seems like opt-in is a good way to do it. People who want their posts to be searchable can easily enable the option. Those who prefer to not have their posts easily discoverable can keep the status quo.

If it had been made opt-out, instantly everyone who does not want this would be automatically searchable and the onus would be on them to disable search. Can imagine a lot of angry users over such a move.

#search