Searchtodon meta, scraping related :boosts_ok_gay:​ 

I mentioned these concerns in the announcement thread but wanted to reiterate them here separately. social.pixie.town/@f0x/1096775

It does a lot of things right, and advertises itself as built with privacy and consent in mind.

However, while a user's search results are limited to content they could've otherwise seen pass by in their home timeline, all these toots are stored and indexed on the central Searchtodon server, indefinitely.

This means he technically has access to the combined timelines of all the users, and unlike public content scrapers **also followers-only and even DM posts** sent by **any user a Searchtodon user is following**.

There's only an opt-*out* mechanism based on setting your profile to be non-search-engine-indexible, or including a few specific hashtags.
Without opting out though **all your toots** will be stored if *any* of your followers use this tool.

While this for now remains just a technical possibility, with him stating he has no intent of misusing it, there is no way to guarantee this now or in the future, or when this data changes hands (sold off or hacked).

A services like this could have merit, but should absolutely be hosted by yourself or your own instance, since it already has control over all this data, meaning there's no extra party to trust.

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re: Searchtodon meta, scraping related :boosts_ok_gay:​ 

His stated goal is to run this as an 'experiment' to 'have this conversation', but in my opinion that could've happened (and was already happening) without publishing a tool, or at the very least making people explicitly **opt-in** to indexing of their toots like this

re: Searchtodon meta, scraping related :boosts_ok_gay:​ 

note: the Mastodon "Opt-out of search engine indexing" setting is not a suitable proxy for consent here, it's hidden away in the settings unknown to most users, and it's also wrongly opt-out instead of opt-in.

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