Sindarina, Edge Case Detective (@sindarina@mastodon.lol)
mstdn.social
I am a bit worried about the number of people here who, like me, are fairly recent arrivals, and who are using the so-called 'extreme' and 'unreasonable' reactions to them wanting to 'hack' the fediverse to write off the whole conversation around consent as somehow not relevant. The NSA monitors anything you do on the internet anyway, so why are you complaining about tech bros wanting to harvest out in the open, yada yada. It seems we need to define what consent actually is. AGAIN.
  • 【alma】
    3•2 years ago

    It’s fair that maybe the architecture of public inbox/outbox protocols aren’t suited for this kind of use (juxtapose with Matrix).

    However consider this: Some people on the fediverse simply don’t want to be indexed. It should be opt-in instead of opt-out, for people who explicitly want it. People aren’t against search, they’re against non-consensual search.

    I think it’s important for the culture of the fediverse that such civility is encouraged. Because on the fediverse, the community can actually make a difference. By blocking federation with offenders, we can guide the culture of fedi. And it’s better for it.

    Running with the idea that people can “technically” do what they want because of the nature of the protocols is counter-productive, because we actually can do something.

    All a search implementer has to do is adapt to that culture, and they’ll be fine. So I don’t see why there’s such push-back against this viewpoint.

    • erpicht
      2•2 years ago

      I would fully agree that other internet protocols are much better suited to information not meant to be broadcast publicly.

      Civility is great, and should be highly encouraged. That’s largely why I like Lemmy. Each instance can guide its community in line with its values, whatever those may be, block offenders, and generally forge the space it wishes.

      However, I think Besse’s comments on setting the correct expectations in the public sphere are worth considering.

      For a different internet example: all the messages I send in any chatroom on an IRC server will inevitably be logged by someone, especially in popular rooms. Any assumption to the contrary would be naïve, and demanding that people not keep a log any of my publicly broadcast messages would be laughed at by the operators. It’s a public space, and sending anything to that space necessarily means I forgo my ability to control who sees, aggregates, archives, or shares that information. My choice to put the information into that space is the opt-in mechanism, just how books or interviews do the same offline in print.

      It’s not so much the protocol as it is how making things public fundamentally works.