Some instances on the Fediverse offer full-text search of statuses (not just self-authored ones), and I'm wondering how to deal with that. I'm tempted to block every instance doing so, because the current expectation of our users is that their statuses will not be full-text searchable by strangers.
Opinions? What should we do with instances offering full-text search for all statuses? #mastoadmin
@rixx Why is that the expectation of chaos.social users?
I'd assume that anything I post on the internet will be able to be found via some search engine, does Mastodon provide some protection against that?
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No protection, in fact the feature is built into mastodon, its just up to the admin if they want to turn it on locally or not.
@freemo Could you elaborate where the feature of full-text search for all statuses is a part of Mastodon? The documentation states that their FTS integration supports only logged-in users searching for statuses from their own posts, mentions, and favs. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/optional/elasticsearch/
That's noticeably differnt from being able to FTS all users' statuses, hence the consideration.
@rixx Sure. All you do is put the following line in your mastodon's .env file and it turns on full-text searching (assuming you also are running the proper services): "ES_ENABLED=true"
Here is the official documentation that explains how to turn off or on this feature: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/optional/elasticsearch/
@freemo That is the exact part of the documentation I linked, so I'm not sure why you point to this. It states very explicitly that "Mastodonโs full-text search allows logged in users to find results from their own toots, their favourites, and their mentions. It deliberately does not allow searching for arbitrary strings in the entire database."
@rixx ahh i see what you mean now.. notice you can also search for mentions.. .I think this explains the confusion. When i search i **do** get other peoples statuses but only if they mention me (I see that now).
What server do you know of offers full text search of all statuses? As far as i know if a instance allows full text search it is this feature they are enabling... are there any servers that have some hack to this feature?
@freemo Since your instance states that it offers FTS, and you have repeated this claim as including all statuses, I had to assume (for the sake of our users) that you were doing what you said you were doing.
@rixx To be clear this is the exact wording on our about page. As you can see we dont state anywhere that our searches do not honor the privacy as you suggested: "Full text searches - usually you can only search hashtags and usernames"
I would hope most level headed people would see that and understand it is refering to enabled the standrd FTS feature since we never made any public statements to the contrary.
