this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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I found FediSearch, and also this post basically saying that a fediverse search engine would just be used as a tool by trolls.
It's worth noting that since FedSearch, Mastodon has actually natively implemented opt-in search on posts.
That’s a good point. But those people can be banned? I guess Reddit handles this by moderation and archiving old posts.
Yes, but moderation teams on the fediverse are very small, and by nature of it, can make hundreds of account of different servers all trailing that would need to be individually sought out and banned.
It is a game of cat & 100 mice
People will take the harassment off site especially if they are dedicated enough or use it to scrape for potential personal info to publicly release.
How is that different from Reddit? If trolls want to search and scrape and find information on people, they're going to. You can't put your information on the open Internet and not appreciate there's always a danger of that.
There is more effort barrier if the trolls have to do all the scraping and sorting themselves than just popping a term that is a right wing lightning rod into search and getting a list of targets.
That post wasn't claiming that a search engine would only be used by trolls; it was explaining that they shut down their project because a chunk of the fediverse thinks that and complain about any search engine projects. Discoverability is one of the network's biggest challenges and a search engine could really help with that.
Yes, not only used by trolls, but would be a tool that could be leveraged by trolls. And I think the fediverse makes it easier to establish instances for marginalized groups, but also has more admins that just don't want trolls because nobody here is making $ off them like the corporate socials are. I think if adding search that is going to try and vacuum up everyone's posts in the fediverse and make them easily sortable/targetable without instance admins permission, then that isn't cool. If someone is running a general instance that covers nothing that a troll could latch onto and wants the instance catalogued and searchable then that's fine by me. I don't think boys should be doing that to the fediverse as a whole without admin permission though.
I don't think an admin's permission has anything to do with it. If you post publicly on the fediverse, your posts are public. You should have the option to opt out of any indexing (just like you do for the rest of the open web). But saying its ok for you to read this post if it happens to come across your feed but you shouldn't be allowed to find it via a search is ridiculous. Users get to make the choice with each post whether its public or not, but they don't get to control how people consume those public posts.
Reading a post and having a bot thrashing a server indexing everything are 2 different things. If a user used the site like that they would be throttled and if repeated afterwards, banned. It is also one thing to read/interact with a site as that adds value to the site as a whole. A bot that just mass hits links cataloging everything is just a strain on the server an Admin needs to support, with no upside for the instance, as it's a bot ingesting and no real interaction actually took place.
This is a completely separate argument and one that we already have mechanisms for. Servers can use status codes and headers to warn about rate limits and block offenders.
A search index adds value as well; that's why this keeps coming up. And, again, there are existing mechanisms to handle this. A
robots.txtfile can indicate you don't want to be crawled and offenders can be IP blockedShould a dedicated search not use/index ActivityPub instead of the html interface?
If so, instances can simply defederate from search engine instances. So the point you are trying to make still holds.