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@Codex ☯️♈☮ The "anti-search" minority is not anti-search per se.

But Fediverse-wide search is only technically possible with something central. And what these people do not want is any kind of central elements in the Fediverse.

Anything central, be it search or whatever, will allow one single person or one group of people to assume control and power over the whole Fediverse. Some say that Eugen Rochko already has too much power as he a) is the developer behind 99% of the Fediverse, b) can basically dictate in which way all other Fediverse projects develop, otherwise they stop being compatible with Mastodon, and c) runs the two biggest Mastodon instances.

It's even worse when some happy-go-lucky fellow who seems to neither know nor care about FLOSS launches a no-opt-in, not-even-opt-out central search engine for the Fediverse and makes it proprietary and closed-source. Not only could he take over the whole Fediverse, but you can't even check the inner workings of the search engine to see whether or not it's prepared for just that.

A central search engine could also be or become the property of a for-profit company. For one, this means that search results are being filled with ad spam by paying customers, and/or searches are being sold to Google or any other Big Data hoarder and broker. Besides, the for-profit that runs the search engine could be bought out by some Silicon Valley gigacorporation. And with it essentially the whole Fediverse because the whole Fediverse depends on it.

Allegedly "anti-search" people only appear to be anti-search because all attempts at creating a Fediverse-wide or even only Mastodon-wide search functionality were centralised. And because all widely-known attempts at creating something central were search crawlers.
Ben Pate 🤘🏻

@jupiter_rowland Yes. This will happen. There’s nothing stopping Google from indexing the Fediverse. And that’s a good thing. If it brings more people here, and if those people are still free to Federate however they want, then it’s something to celebrate.

@Ben Pate 🤘 This isn't about Google. This isn't about search-indexing.

Imagine Tootfinder being non-opt-in, non-opt-out like the earlier centralised searches. Imagine Tootfinder firmly embedding itself into every last Fediverse project from Mastodon to Streams to the point of everyone and everything relying on it.

Now imagine Google buying out Tootfinder in a hostile takeover.

This would mean that Google ASSUMES FULL CONTROL over the entire Fediverse.

This is what we want to keep from happening. This is why we don't want anything central in the Fediverse.

We do NOT want the Fediverse to be controlled by any one central instance. Especially not by Google. Or Apple. Or Facebook. Or Amazon. Or Microsoft. Or any other corporation. Or some greedy VC vultures.

Or imagine Google assuming full and direct control over all e-mail. Not only Google Mail, but also Outlook Mail, Yahoo! Mail etc., including privacy-oriented paid providers in Europe, including every last little private personal mail server run by geeks in their homes.

@jupiter_rowland Yes. Men in pinstripes suits are already working out how they can take over the Fediverse. I have no doubt. And they’ll be creative and sneaky about it, too. At the same time, search WILL happen somehow, because it’s good for the end users. So, I think the best defense is to manage HOW search happens, and to make *user-centric* standards for how external services can integrate with Fediverse apps

@Ben Pate 🤘 Ideally, a Fediverse search engine would be decentralised and federated itself, and ideally, the code would be maintained by "the community" rather than one individual. But I guess that'd be hard to achieve.

Even then, such a search engine probably wouldn't be able to index the entire Fediverse right away and all the time. If you want tiny new instances of even the most obscure Fediverse project to be crawled right after they've come alive on someone's Raspberry Pi for the first time, you'd have to include support for such a search engine in the projects themselves. Instead of users or instances, the projects would have to opt in.

@jupiter_rowland Yes and yes. (Thanks for this cool chat, by the way) A fully decentralized search service seems infeasible, but perhaps there’s a hub-and-spoke approach that might work. We won’t solve all the worlds I’ll here in this chat, but I think open protocols and open APIs are the key, so that any add-on service can be user-swappable.

@benpate @jupiter_rowland If it’s just men in pinstripe suits, I don’t think we have that much to worry about as I’ve never seen an engineer in one except maybe their wedding and even then their partner picked it out for them.

@aethervision @jupiter_rowland I was hinting at CEOs and Venture Capitalists. I had deleted several other colorful descriptions for those types because they weren’t very family friendly.

@benpate @jupiter_rowland Oh crap. If you throw in people wearing American Giant hoodies, we’re doomed.