@tamitha @heals first, i’m not saying can/can’t; anything is possible but there are strengths and drawbacks in terms of social factors and rollout
the issue here is folks on other instances. your instance knows right now that my account is discoverable; it does NOT know whether or not my account has opted in or out of search indexing. that information doesn’t federate. if a new flag were added, even if i turned it on, you would have to wait until my instance upgraded and started sharing that information before you could index my public posts. (i think this would be the right decision fwiw)
what eugen is doing instead is using the property your instance DOES know about, “discoverability”, because it means even if i don't upgrade my instance, your instance can still index the posts if it wants. this is what i’m calling nefarious
@Lady @tamitha so what you're saying (and thank you for your opinion, I think it would be the right approach as well) - is that eugen is pushing to have indexing spread as far as possible without having to wait for instances to opt-in by updating / risking that instances generally opt-out by having a flag that is default off.. that's really sad actually.
Feels like a case where convenience won over control of your own privacy.