Global Fulltext Search Policy

Thanks for sharing the GlitchCat Stance on Global Fulltext Search I really like what was written about honoring author intention, and am interested in collective ways that we can support, inform and protect our users. Do you have a sense of what silence means in that context? Does it mean de-federate? Is there a list of know instances with global search turned on now?

It is a tricky thing to explain, but I would support social.coop articulating a position on this. Is it worth putting together a proposal in a shared doc?

I'm alarmed by global fulltext search as I see it enabling harassers to readily find new victims to inflict their antipathy upon.

I'm curious what GlitchCat means by silencing instances that implement global fulltext search. However, I see their policy as a starting point for our policy.

Note that nothing is "global" in mastodon, full text search is only over the posts that are already downloaded onto your servers (via relays, users of your server following the user on another server, etc.) so this doesn't really change anything: the limit of how it can be used to harass people is still almost just as limited as it would have been before.

I apparently need to learn more about how it all works. From your comment, I seemingly don't need to be so concerned.

ah good point, the Mastodon terms aren’t obvious:

Blocking and silencing

If the admins of Instance1 blockInstance2, then the users of Instance1 cannot interact with the users of Instance2.

If the admins of Instance1 silenceInstance2, then the users of Instance1 can still privately follow and interact with the users of Instance2, but those interactions (like boosts) will not be seen by the other users of Instance1.

To be more clear: blocking is used for Instances that permit horrible things and behaviours, while silencing is used for Instances that your Instance tolerate but doesn’t appreciate that much.

From https://mastodon.help/

That said, I’m unclear that the effect of silencing an instance would exclude our posts from Full Text Search, I might need to do some tests.

From my reading of that, silencing appears to be ineffective at preventing full text searching by instances implementing global full text searching. The question I have is:

If instance1 silences instance2, what can the users on instance2 do with regards to instance1?

My view is that full-text isn't harmful enough in itself to justify silencing, defederating, or otherwise punishing another instance. Full-text search seems like a promising feature and worth experimenting with, despite the risks. Servers implementing full-text search may violate some users' privacy expectations. However such expectations aren't enforceable through technical means when you publish on the open web. In general, my intuition is that prohibiting such functionality common to other social media systems is a major cost to the fediverse and that safety can be achieved through other means. A model for ensuring safety that depends on enforcing compliance with such significant \design decisions will limit too much the growth of the fediverse and its potential to incubate innovation in social media.

Some large instances have recently decided to remove that limitation.

Where can I read more about that? I'd like to understand the motivation, context and concrete implementation that's been proposed by these instances before commenting on our policy towards those instances.

@Erik Moeller apologies I misread the scope of the 2 instances that announced search capabilities on their servers. Turns out it is only the same implementation as we have on social coop. Ie searching will return posts you’ve interacted with (your own, mentioned, boosted, liked, bookmarked).