this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2023
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And here's the point at which we go off the rails (towards the end of the thread; the earlier section is quite well expressed):
We then have some reasonable responses from others in the thread:
Rich Felker @dalias@hachyderm.io
Arne Babenhauserheide @ArneBab@rollenspiel.social
*snip*
Finally, a thought of mine own:
Sindarina seems to fundamentally miss the central idea of the world wide web, that is, publically sharing information. This does not mean the work may be used for any purpose whatsoever, as the content of many websites is either copyrighted or CC-BY-SA. But publishing anything on the www or in print, opens it by necessity to aggregation and archival. I routinely save webpages to disk.
To run with the cafe analogy that has been brought up, one cannot post a note to the cafe's bulletin board and at the same time expect that no one else may take a photo of it, then perhaps share it with some acquaintances.
This is a far cry from the data harvesting done by Google, Microsoft, Apple & co., or the dubiously collected data used to train "automated plagiarism engine[s]," as Arthur Besse put it not too long 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.
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.