…in light of the nonconsensual scrapers and similar things on fedi, I need to do a lot of reconsideration of the visibility model. I thought it was simple and clear (and maybe it is), but I don't think that's the best anymore and I'm going to be rethinking what “public” means and what the system will let you do.
@moonbolt In case you're not aware, Mastodon allows users to configure what the robots.txt-like mechanism[1] should report for their profile page (and presumably threads); it's in "Preferences > Other > Opt-out of search engine indexing".
It obviously affects only crawlers that will obey that, but that might already be helpful?
[1] I presume that's done via robots meta tag or via X-Robots-Tag header; I haven't checked though.
@moonbolt
Aaaaaah, I now see where I read too much into it.
(The curse of trying to compensate for reading too little of what people wish to imply~~.)
@robryk to be clear, this thread is not /about/ scrapers|privacy violations on fedi—I only mentioned that because it's what got me thinking about this.