On the one hand it's bizarre from a technical standpoint to insist that Mastodon can't search or quote-post, when the software is federated and open source (so I can change my own instance to enable search and quote-posts), and when an API is available (so I can roll my own search index without even running my own instance).
If you don't want your stuff archived and indexed by strangers you don't trust, then don't post your stuff in public to a federated network operated by strangers you don't trust.
On the other hand it's not really a technical problem, it's a social problem, contrary to everyone who will try to solve E2E federated group encryption in this thread.
It's a social problem because if I fork the project to enable search and quote-posts, any instances running that fork will get defederated by the community that doesn't want search and quote-posts.
Maybe the Eternal September of new people will want these features, and a fork will become more popular than the original branch. The people will decide what they want and vote with their instances.
As for me, I want self-search, so I built my own full-text search service that indexes everything I post and everything I tag as interesting. I've opened it up to a few friends, but we won't publicize it since it would be a pretty unpopular thing at the moment.
[Edit: I misunderstood what the parent comment meant. My apologies. My original comment's text is left intact below, but it is inherently misdirected because of the misunderstanding. It still can be, of course, argued that a proposed solution is not realistically attainable - it's quite a tectonic shift in the collective psyche. But the parent is correct.]
I'd disagree. It's fundamentally a [techno]logical problem - a flawed design that only "works" because it's not happening at scale. The pen is mightier than a sword, and ink lasts longer than memory. Those millennia-old maxims still stand very true.
It guaranteed to get only "worse" as the system scales up and gains more "bad" actors that don't conform to the behavior. And it never will be solved socially (only mended) just like email spam was never socially solved, despite giant collective efforts like RBLs, community spam filters and IP reputations. Only shoved under the rug or plastered over, to be repeatedly revealed when a next drama happens.
I'd be happy to be wrong (if you know that I am - please give me an example), but I think that social and legal methods are never the solution, they don't ever fix anything (unless we're talking about humanity radically changing - then, maybe). They provide certain safeguards against honest people not accidentally screwing up, they have chilling effects, and they provide some recourse after the trust is broken - but they never fix the core issue.
Sometimes there is no way to change the design. Like - as a possibly silly example - we can't fix theft or murder, so those are social problems because we don't have technologies (such as achieving post-scarcity or immortality) to fix them. But the information security here is essentially math problem and it can be fixed.
Of course, whenever it will be is a matter of cost. Chances are, no one would ever do it, because it'll be too complicated (=costly) and the social approach would be good enough. Like how the world can't even switch to the IPv6. But, again, something like that doesn't really solve anything for real, merely lowers the frequency of occurrences to a tolerable level.
> but I think that social and legal methods are never the solution
Just to be clear we're talking about indexing + searching what people post on public internet feeds?
IMO there are only social solutions to this problem. Any legal one would probably kill any federated service that can barely compete with centralized ones as it is... or (more likely) not be enforceable in the first place.
There's two social solutions:
1) don't post things you don't want recorded forever on public networks
OR
2) stop treating every mistake humans makes in their personal history as deal breaker for life
The first is a matter of personal responsibility, which is not a very popular concept in certain communities popular online. The other is more rational and practical but is still a very serious problem in western culture. Countless people have been 'cancelled' (or attempts have been made) based on 10yr old internet posts the posters themselves denounce.
If you want technical solutions use Signal, not a federated Twitter competitor.
> Just to be clear we're talking about indexing + searching what people post on public internet feeds?
Yes. I've only brought legal here, as there is some movement towards using legal frameworks for privacy ("right to be forgotten" etc.), as I totally misunderstood what kind of social solutions you propose.
> There's two social solutions: [...]
D'oh! Now I see. And I'm honestly sorry, as I completely misunderstood what you meant saying it's a "social problem".
I wholeheartedly agree now - either of those would be an ultimate solution. Not just a solution - I also do believe that this is how things should be.
It can be argued how realistic it is - I mean, it's quite a giant change to how society sees things. But I hope - at the grand timescale - it's well achievable. Many societies had drastically changed during the 20th century, so who knows where we'll end up...
Yeah, agreed, the "right to be forgotten" legal could be very expensive to enforce on a federated internet. It's only feasible when Google is all you have to deal with. Even then it's a big hassle.
Search and quote-post are very different in this regard.
Quote-post can be a problem because it encourages bad behavior among people who aren't actively malicious. If the most popular Fediverse software doesn't support it, there won't be a widespread quote-poste -> pile-on phenomenon even if a few servers support it without getting widely blocked.
Search becomes a problem when a group of bad actors use it to harass and dox people. It doesn't require widespread adoption, just a small number of bad actors with access to an index. From what I've read about previous organized far-right harassment campaigns, I find it likely that bad actors are already indexing Fediverse posts, but not publicly talking about it. Excluding search features from the most popular software will not help with this. Blocking servers that admit they're indexing posts for search will not help with this.
Yes, Elasticsearch is an option, but many (most?) instances haven't installed it, including mine.
And even when it is installed, it doesn't do what I want.
In addition to my own posts, I want to index the public posts of those I follow, and I want to organize by topics that aren't found in the text of the post, and I want to "follow" search terms similar to how the latest Masto allows following hashtags.
None of this is available with Elasticsearch even if it was enabled on my instance.
If you don't want your stuff archived and indexed by strangers you don't trust, then don't post your stuff in public to a federated network operated by strangers you don't trust.
On the other hand it's not really a technical problem, it's a social problem, contrary to everyone who will try to solve E2E federated group encryption in this thread.
It's a social problem because if I fork the project to enable search and quote-posts, any instances running that fork will get defederated by the community that doesn't want search and quote-posts.
Maybe the Eternal September of new people will want these features, and a fork will become more popular than the original branch. The people will decide what they want and vote with their instances.
As for me, I want self-search, so I built my own full-text search service that indexes everything I post and everything I tag as interesting. I've opened it up to a few friends, but we won't publicize it since it would be a pretty unpopular thing at the moment.