Federated directories are a good feature, and go a long way towards solving the discovery problem that has long plagued federated social networks.

It sounds like Gargron might have had some blind spots in developing this for Mastodon, but I'm not sure the backlash is entirely warranted. There are probably some implementation details that need fixing, like sorting, or hiding directory results of people who are blocking your instance.

I saw someone earlier say that he's trying to make Mastodon more like corporate social networks to appeal to new users and replicate some of the not-so-nice things that social media entails. This could be true when we talk about trending, but it's false when discussing opt-in user directories.

After about a decade in this space, I can safely say that this kind of feature actually would solve a long-held problem in the space that really does make it hard for new people to find each other. It's probably one of the only ways to actually solve it. We just have to make sure it doesn't suck.

@sean Mastodon is becoming to corperate style, this way of being able to lookup users is a privacy risk. I'm glad I migrated to pleroma a few months back as the mastodon project is going in a direction I realy don't like. Instance blocking, adding privacy risks, not repsecting the fact that GNU social came before it.

@louisoft01 it doesn't have to be a privacy risk. It's opt-in, and more of a shorthand for peeling through a tree of objects containing basic public profile metadata.

Friendica and Hubzilla have had it for years, and although their combined userbases are much smaller, they have never had a problem.

There is a sane way to design this feature in a manner that doesn't suck. The biggest issue in my opinion, other than sort order, would be a reliable way to accept retractions from users who don't want to be seen in the directory anymore, after being there for a while. These are largely solved problems.

I think it would also be a good idea to hide users from the servers that they are blocking. Basically it would tell each directory on an instance "never deliver my record to domain1, domain 2, or domain 3."

@sean instance blocking should have never been a thing

@louisoft01 @sean lukewarm at best