Fediverse search engine Holos Discover shut down this week, showing structural issues how to distinguish between individual and community consent.
Community members pointed out that the indexable flag is enabled by default on many instances, which means that a significant number of accounts with the flag set never made a deliberate choice to be indexed. The flag that’s supposed to signal “this person consents to being searchable” frequently signals “this person’s server admin didn’t change the default”, and on a protocol-level, there is no difference between these two options.
Maybe Mastodon could get the user to set this during onboarding. Then no one can say they didn’t choose.
its interesting because even fecesbook has a setting for this
i genuinely don’t understand how being indexable could be considered a violation of privacy. consent, sure. but why would you want to avoid being indexed?