OctopusLupid

The communities that publicly shame search providers also publicly shame and block lolicon servers. I don’t see how that means that they are protecting those servers by disliking search.

> I guess you could frame this as a privacy argument, but I don't buy that as the primary reason people were upset with "Fedisearch." They were upset because it exposed their communities of lolicon enthusiasts. Do they deserve privacy or is that more of an excuse to keep their content off the radar of law enforcement and out of reach of polite society?

From my time speaking to Fediverse long-timers, no, this is not the case.

I think both of you are visualising "posting on the Fediverse" differently. One visualises it as a conversation between two people that may be overheard, while the other visualises it as broadcasting.

Google is indeed already indexing the Fediverse. A Fediverse long-timer I've talked to justified this by saying that Mastodon is "more like speaking" and websites are "more like publishing". However, I pointed out that IndieWeb and influencers exist too.

Personally, I am unconvinced by the long-timer's argument. I believe that if you are against Fediverse crawlers ethically, you must be against web crawlers as well, and indeed I spent months without Google, DDG, or any other crawler-based search -- StackOverflow tags, Wikipedia and bookmarks were my friends. It was an enlightening experience, but I now hold the reverse position.

I’m a bit confused. Isn’t there a lot of queer-ness on Twitter, Reddit etc?

Do you mean deep web?

Harassment and toxicity on Mastodon is a very real thing.

This quote from Eugen is about CWs, but I think it applies here too:

“… It's a decentralized network that doesn't belong to any one party, so by definition there is no single culture on it. Different corners have different expectations and customs.” - https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109323056922301691

I was under the impression that boosting follower only posts does not work (via the API too, actually, it returns a HTTP error code if you try to do so), but then again the server code may be modified, or people can just screenshot.

I think this is simply a social problem — when sending a post to your followers, you have to trust that they do not share your post. The same applies in private messaging. You have to trust the recipients.

I believe they meant physically. Just because you can't stop people physically smoking doesn't mean you can't stop them by social or legal (which reflects social) means.

Similarly, just because you can't stop people from indexing Mastodon physically, doesn't mean that you can't stop them by social or legal means. However, I would add that the internet is really hard to control because of how open it is, which is why we patch security vulnerabilities instead of only relying on publicly shaming or arresting malicious actors on the internet.

Furthermore, crawlers may not respect the opt-out tag. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/13207

Another thing -- noindex is not federated. I used to enable noindex, and still found my content on Google (mirrored on other instances that I was federated with). I just allowed indexing.

Very good points. Thanks for your thoughts.

If you enable follow requests, and trust the admins of your followers, does that work as a privacy feature? From what I know, such posts do not get federated to unrelated servers, right?

To add on to this, remember that there is a Fediverse plugin for Wordpress as well.

There are jurisdictions (the EU, the UK, Singapore, Japan) with copyright exceptions specifically for text and data mining for AI purposes.

https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2021/singapore/coming-u...

I come from the side of "search should exist", but I enjoyed this nuanced read. Thank you.

You lose your followers if you get banned. I was following someone who got banned for disagreeing with moderation policies. I suggested asking the admin to help with the migration; he did, and the admin refused.

This was a rather large server too, featured on JoinMastodon.

I feel like Lobsters has better quality discourse nowadays though, due to its much more explicit vetting system. I am not part of that website, yet I love reading the comment section there.

No, a few days ago this page was public.

My partner has OCD and he heavily dislikes people misusing the term.

Don't forget Matrix.

I'm a server admin; I think there's merit to this thought. There is an initial hump.

We don't want to dump users randomly into a small server because the community aspect is much stronger there. Thus, we should dump them into a big server -- perhaps a randomly selected one, from a list of general-purpose trusted servers (ideally democratically selected, but for now JoinMastodon.org seems to be fine).

Then, encourage people to move to smaller instances, and make it easier to do so. It's currently too hard. I moved because I was envious of smaller server's interesting public timelines which catered more to my interests.

On the other hand, your per-server handles can be much shorter. For example, @[email protected] vs @TimCook. This also comes with built-in verification; @[email protected] is probably fake.

My comment is uninformed, but I feel like centralised companies have the R&D resources to create innovation, which communities then steal (in a good way) to make the technology free (as in freedom) for everyone. That's why there's a cycle.

I can confirm this is what I did. I started on mastodon.social, then eventually moved to a smaller instance when I got jealous of their local timeline. Then I'm now hosting my own server in the closet.

Related link advocating for the same thing: https://runyourown.social/

This seems to be rather US-centric. Here's the EU version: https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2021/02/17/tdm-excepti...

Singapore version: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2021/singapore/coming-u...

Other countries have already made copyright exceptions for AI training.

What makes you say it's illegal?

In the EU, UK, Japan and Singapore, it is explicitly legal to train AI on copyrighted work. I saw another comment say that AI companies train in those countries.

If everyone is able to make their own app, then there is no need to advertise their apps, because everyone will just be using their own.

The real battle there would be protocols; how everyone's custom apps communicate. Here, we can fall back to existing protocols such as email, ActivityPub, Matrix, etc.