What is Nostr?
Jupiter Rowland /
npub198j…d3fm
2023-04-11 09:30:18
in reply to nevent1q…vnca

Jupiter Rowland on Nostr: @Chris Trottier There are mainly two kinds of people who don't want full-text search ...

@Chris Trottier There are mainly two kinds of people who don't want full-text search on Mastodon/in the Fediverse.

One, the LGBTQIA+ community whose members are constantly being harassed by ultra-conservative, right-wing nutters on Twitter who out-right search-crawl the birbsite for anyone who tweets keywords like "gay" or "trans". They're on Mastodon because this is technologically impossible on Mastodon. If Mastodon introduced this, so they fear, they'll be harassed on Mastodon just the same as on Twitter.

Two, the old pre-Mastodon Federated Social Web guard. They're opposed to Fediverse-wide full-text search because all implementations so far have been one centralised entity each.

See, for most Mastodon users, Mastodon is the first and only free, open-source, non-corporate piece of software in their lives, and they happily continue to only use stuff from Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft etc. otherwise. They either don't care whether or not Mastodon is fully decentralised, or they see it as a nuisance they have to put up with or else go back to Twitter.

For the old pre-Mastodon Federated Social Web guard who still resides on Friendica or Hubzilla or has moved past Mastodon, Pleroma etc. straight to (streams), this is different. Decentralisation, distribution and federation is everything for them. It's critically important for the whole Fediverse to never ever rely on any centralised service.

It's actually bad enough that the Fediverse already does use centralised services like fediverse.info. But centralised search would become a pillar without which the Fediverse could no longer stand because everything (or almost everything, i.e. the vastness that is Mastodon) relies on it and will hardly work any longer without it.

Centralised search brings three risks with itself.

Risk one: Shutdown for good. It's a single point of failure. That one instance goes down, the whole feature goes down.

Risk two: Corporate buy-out because some Silicon Valley corporation makes the owner of the search too good an offer. And what do you know, all of a sudden, that Fediverse-wide search is controlled by Microsoft or Google or Facebook or Elon Musk.

Risk three: Governmental meddling. Especially if that one central search server is located in the USA which is much much more likely than it running in, for example, Iceland or Switzerland. And you won't even notice that the NSA is siphoning off every single last search request because the owner received a gag order and has never set up a warrant canary.
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npub198jy9z7jydzryezatw4ceesw6kv022c26he7npunvap2xnl3v0nsn2d3fm