this is probably my most popular toot by now. if so many people agree, why do techbros keep writing shitty scrapers under the guise of "people totally want this", hmm?
@rbairwell @aendra @doot As someone with ADHD, I have no right to feed data of others to some third party service, so I can make things convenient for myself.
I don't think anyone argues against having a private, self-hosted search or search on your own instance :) It would even be quite possible to buid it into a web client.
update: Searchtodon meta, scraping related
Since then multiple others have mentioned these concerns to him, but they're dismissed just the same.
Yet again a recently joined twitter techbro is writing a scraper, but this time it's couched in language about "consent" and "privacy", it's still effectively building a centralized search index across users on his single server. Opt-out is also not actually consent, both legally (GDPR) and morally.
He keeps dismissing it as just a non-ideal stopgap-solution but that doesn't matter. it's about what's happening right now. random users logging in thinking there's *anything* private about this service, and feeding their entire following to the machine
they cannot seem to appreciate the value of nestling down among a small group of friends and sharing genuine things about yourself
for real though these tech guy types seem to live in a different fucking world, where being visible + discoverable and indexed is some kind of virtue in and of itself
Just published my article/devlog about FediFox Shield, my project for a nicer public Mastodon frontend
It goes deep into some technical details I had lots of fun implementing, but also explains the overall motivation, and next steps for the project
re: Searchtodon meta, scraping related
it's kinda weird seeing how even normally more critical people are responding to this. There's a thin veneer of "consent" and "private" but his service is still building a giant searchable index across everyone who uses it. like wtf. The software has merit when part of an instance but why would there ever be a centralized setup
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if i don't know you from elsewhere (under same nick), shoot me an introductory DM first (following back is fine)
I do anarchist tech stuff and run free services at https://pixie.town
I program, solder rgb led thingies, and fly fpv quadcopters
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“i don't trust like that”
not a furry, actually
Extreme coffee-out-of-a-wineglass Energy
something something trans list stop scraping bios
and now a word from our sponsors (screenreader warning it's zalgo)
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