Lady @Lady@cat.family

@jdp23 @oliphant@oliphant.social @zkat @blogdiva historically fedipacts have been used primarily by sus instances to try to mandate federation from other instances in the pact. i think it's foolish to assume that every instance in a federation will necessarily want to federate with every other instance, even if belongingness in that federation is opt-in, not the least of all because instances are run by people and people sometimes have falling-outs with each other. sometimes mods of instances with very similar values hate each other's guts. sometimes people with generally good values on paper are abusive interpersonally.

i’m really hesitant towards any system which threatens to take away from admins the ability to make these determinations on a case-by-case basis. “you have to either defederate from the entire community of instances or continue federating with your abuser” is not a healthy federation model. doubly if the penalty to defederation is also losing your funding model. we need a system which allows people to disengage without losing community support

@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

@heals @tamitha this isn't possible currently because the search indexing flag doesn't federate. we really need upstream to not mess this up or else we basically have to introduce a new, limited-discoverability flag and also stop federating the old one for people who don't want to be indexed.

my guess is eugen is taking this strategy because he knows that many instances are on outdated versions of the software and wouldn't be discoverable under a new flag. so he's keying it off of something they're already using. which is really nefarious, imo

@coriander especially potent since i taught my bard Web

@coriander what i actually believe though is that objects gain souls through their interactions with people and you can apply that to books how you will