One of the many examples of the disdain the Mastodon dev community has for mainstream users. Mastodon instances are apparently very against indexing posts, even for positive things like discoverability.
Someone tried indexing the major instances a few months ago, and they got banned from all of those Instances.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/131amhl/why_are_so_many_against_crawlingindexing/
Huh, it’s interesting that you see this as disdain for mainstream users. I don’t think of it that way at all. Having private companies own copies of everything everyone says online forever is not really how most people want social media to work I think. I’m not really against “indexing” necessarily, but I definitely believe that making more local spaces is a pretty good goal for decentralized social, and indexing is one variable in that equation.
I see your point, but is it really realistic to expect publicly posted things on social media to somehow avoid being copied/indexed in some way?
If someone doesn’t want their posts indexed by a mastodon search engine project let’s say, they’re always free to make their profile private, so only those they follow can see their stuff.
I mean it kind of sounds like it *is* realistic on Fediverse if the consensus is just to defederate anyone caught indexing at a large scale. We had a similar issue on scuttlebutt with indexing. I'm pretty against trying to create privacy via a social contract in an open protocol. But the whole point of the Fediverse is that it *isn't* really an open protocol like Nostr. The main network is basically one big social contract. I don't think they are trying to cover the globe the way Twitter did (I'm sure there's many who would like it to, but that's not the consensus from my observations).
But yeah good point about profile privacy.
