fediverse search (i built another thing)
Speaking of apps, ill-advisedly, I'm touching the hot stove of fediverse search again with a bad prototype.
This is a bot that aims to only index toots from mutual follows. Anything more than that is a bug to be fixed.
You follow it, it follows you, it saves toots for search. You block it, it no longer sees toots.
I want it to auto-unfollow when unfollowed and delete the saved toots, but that's currently complicated (unfollow notifications are not a thing in the Mastodon API, AIUI). As a hack, I might have it honor an "unfollow" and/or "forget me" in DM as the signal of withdrawn consent and to purge.
If/when I rewrite it as a native activitypub server - rather than a Mastodon API bot - I think that comes with proper unfollow messages? Still, best to have more options to accept signals of positive & negative consent
fediverse search (i built another thing)
@lmorchard thank you for making it opt in only! big improvement in terms of consent mechanisms over previous attempts at fedi search
one question though: i assume you’re filtering out followers only posts from the database? they’ll technically be served to the bot, because its a follower of the accounts it scrapes, but i doubt anyone would expect that to mean they were made publicly searchable
re: fediverse search (i built another thing)
@lmorchard great to hear! thanks for the quick response
re: fediverse search (i built another thing)
@Satsuma Well, thanks for lending me some thoughts on it!
re: fediverse search (i built another thing)
@Satsuma Hmm, good point. I have the query for search restricting to visibility==public, but I should be sure to check that on the ingest end too! (Don't want that in the database in any case)