> 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 wouldn't expect them to tell you otherwise... that's my point. What justification have you heard?

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 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 indeed.

Can attest to that. The worst online interactions I have had are on it.

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 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.

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?

They can. Someone could get your post, then boost it, which distributes it to whoever follows them and so on.

Anyone thinking their post is only seen by their followers when they have federation turned on is grossly misinformed.

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 agree with you when it comes to private messages, and anyone sharing those is a jerk.

I don't agree in this case where the system is designed to spread those posts. Fair enough if you don't want that to happen, in which case don't use a federated system where that is a design goal.