Pixietown

I mentioned these concerns in the announcement thread but wanted to reiterate them here separately. https://social.pixie.town/@f0x/109677581893916570

It does a lot of things right, and advertises itself as built with privacy and consent in mind.

However, while a user's search results are limited to content they could've otherwise seen pass by in their home timeline, all these toots are stored and indexed on the central Searchtodon server, indefinitely.

This means he technically has access to the combined timelines of all the users, and unlike public content scrapers also followers-only and even DM posts sent by any user a Searchtodon user is following.

There's only an opt-out mechanism based on setting your profile to be non-search-engine-indexible, or including a few specific hashtags.
Without opting out though all your toots will be stored if any of your followers use this tool.

While this for now remains just a technical possibility, with him stating he has no intent of misusing it, there is no way to guarantee this now or in the future, or when this data changes hands (sold off or hacked).

A services like this could have merit, but should absolutely be hosted by yourself or your own instance, since it already has control over all this data, meaning there's no extra party to trust.

From https://chaos.social/@janl/109677152590563058 and https://chaos.social/@janl/109677164080124847 and the kinda evasive responses to mine and others concerns, it seems he's only intent in listening if it's something a [larger part] of "the community" rather not have, so it's worth chiming in on the original thread

also for fucks sake

That said, I think the Mastodon community will have to have to come to terms with “trust they follow me” and delegating that trust to third parties that are fun or useful.

https://chaos.social/@janl/109677640974046213

No we fucking don't. We've been posting fine here for YEARS without having to come to terms with that. Figures now that this account is a recent join too.
Why do they always bring the "it's the inevitable future" arguments when they're the ones making that ""inevitable"" future

it's kinda weird seeing how even normally more critical people are responding to this. There's a thin veneer of "consent" and "private" but his service is still building a giant searchable index across everyone who uses it. like wtf. The software has merit when part of an instance but why would there ever be a centralized setup

@f0x Oh, and let's not forget Signal of course.