…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.
@robryk I'm thinking of the things people made that /didn't/ honor settings like that, and the justifiably angry and sanctioning reactions to them.
“public” doesn't mean “unbounded distribution”.
I would suggest setting those settings anyway, given that (a) it's easy to do so (b) it might make some of those people actually abstain (c) it makes the activities of others more obviously wrong.
@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.
