Eugen is putting instance admins in an unreasonable situation, and I'm not thrilled with it.
For the last six months, we've had m.s silenced because they couldn't moderate their servers or prevent spam and harassment.
I undid that silence a few days ago, because I noticed people replying to m.s users on one of my posts, and it bothered me that there were people who were responding to what I said and I had no mechanism to view their responses, and they had no way to know I wouldn't see them.
Silencing an instance is a bad half measure that does more to give the illusion of safety than to actually provide safety, and I only employed it in this case because there are enough users I interact with on m.s who are unlikely to move to another instance that I felt it was necessary not to fully break the connection.
But now I'm staring down this full text search issue.
I've broken ties with huge instances in the past over this exact issue, over nearly this exact implementation.
But Eugen has decided that this is the standard for all mastodon instances going forward, and that puts me in a difficult spot.
1) silencing an instance does not keep my users posts out of their full text search.
2) suspended an instance does not keep 100% of my users posts out of their full text search unless I also enable authorized fetch
3) there will be no obvious way to tell, other than software version numbers, who might have full text search enabled, and even less of a way to tell which instances are likely to see it abused.
Personally? I don't mind full text search. I'd probably delete some of my old posts rather than have them available for any random user to turn up at a whim and use a moment in which I was vulnerable against me, but I post publicly, under my real name, without follow requests because I sometimes use this account to draw attention to things I'm passionate about, and I'm not a likely target for abuse.
But a number of the users on my small server were actively harassed off of Twitter through abuse facilitated by full text search, and a large proportion of my users are members of communities that are often targeted in this way, and I owe it to them to do whatever I can to protect them.
And, as demonstrated above, silencing or limiting instances with full text search isn't helpful, it has to be full suspension. (And this is being made the default across new installs and upgrades for the most common software package on the fediverse. Suspending the majority of other instances does not really sound like an option. It seems unlikely that there's a good solution here, so long as Eugen continues down this path. Toothpaste doesn't go back in to the tube. The djinn doesn't go back in the bottle. You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep.)
So ... what the hell should we, as instance admins, do in the face of this?
PC-9801 Enjoyer
Fediverse Contractor
Lina Inver?e
Anatoly Korenchkin
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