Lots of small improvements across the user experience, and opt-in search, make this an important release.

  • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    opt-in search

    This is what I don’t understand: When people mark a post as public and discoverable, meaning Google and Bing and such can already find and index it, why would one need to opt-in to making it available via Mastodon search? Isn’t that what Unlisted is already for?

        • Stad.social Admin@m.stad.social
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          10 months ago

          @SorteKanin Some people object to any feature they have seen be abused on Twitter, whether or not it also has legitimate uses. And as it turns out almost any feature *can* be used to harass. If you want to just have your own little space, search allows bad guys to find you. It of course allows good guys to find you too. Some still do not think that’s a worthwhile tradeoff (I don’t agree, and I think it’s futile, and I support search, btw.)

    • petunia@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Google and Bing’s crawlers can find and index Unlisted posts just as easily as any other.

      Just because there are 3rd-party search engines that don’t respect people’s privacy, doesn’t mean that a 1st party search engine should follow their example.

    • ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      It’s been awhile since I made a new account on a Mastodon instance, but is search engine indexing enabled by default? If it isn’t, then that would probably be part of why this is being made opt-in for Mastodon search, as there’s been a vocal portion of folks on Mastodon opposed to search across the board.

      Even if search engine indexing was enabled by default, y’know those vocal folks probably disable it ASAP and would be making a fuss if this update went & enabled Mastodon search by default. Which, well, why post publicly at all if the concern’s related to privacy or not being bothered by internet randos, but 🤷‍♀️

      • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        as there’s been a vocal portion of folks on Mastodon opposed to search across the board.

        Well, those can tag their posts as Unlisted.