Community discussion around search continues; Searchtodon shuts down
The searching of comments and posts within the fediverse remains an hotly contested topic. Earlier this week we reported the shutdown of the API search tool Fediverse Almanac. Only a few days later, Searchtodon, a tool that only searches your private timeline, shuts down after community feedback. Creator Jan Lehnardt states that it did not gel well with the Mastodon community, and that he will provide a retrospective later.
Evan Prodromou, the co-creator of ActivityPub, meanwhile held a poll on whether developers should build a search tool that reflects current standards, with the results coming more than 70% a (qualified) yes.
In the comments discussing the result of the poll, Evan Prodromou also lists what he thinks some of the community standards are:
- an aversion to being aggregated, collated, sorted and classified
- the default configuration should favour community norms, not the needs of the searcher
- ephemerality. That the past is the past; we should let things disappear with time
- “we said no search, so no fucking search, no matter what, ever”
He also addresses the permission system in ActivityPub, stating: “I expected to have activities addressed to the Public be available for typical Web use: reading and linking. I also think republication should be based on licensing, like Creative Commons licenses. Not very well supported now on the fediverse, unfortunately.People seem to forget who have come to the fediverse from Twitter is that those platforms have republication terms built into their terms of use. Not the case here!”
Aggregration, search, privacy and consent are currently major topics of debates within the fediverse, and it seems likely that we’ll be reporting more about it soon. As the community grows with newcomers from different parts of the internet, such as Twitter, expectations and community standards will have to be learned and disseminated and discussed.