Another person creates a fediverse search engine
Another person gets dogpiled and death threats
Another project someone put love and effort into is shuttered
It's just more motivation for me to build mine, which won't shutter under the pressure, which won't just buckle down and go away. Which will specifically bypass all attempts to block it. Just because. You don't bully people.
@r000t How do you bypass people to block it?
@wholemilk Use public endpoints and firehose feeds on other servers.
They're looking for fucktons of requests. A single request on the websockets endpoint from the latest Chrome version will go unnoticed forever.
@r000t Just curious. Why don't you think communities on the fediverse have the right to not be indexed?
bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@wholemilk @r000t if you put out data - especially into a federated network - you have to expect that it ends up everywhere, forever.
i'm not sure why people can't grasp this about the internet. don't put things online you don't want to be there. they expect that people cover their eyes and ears when they do the equivalent of standing naked on a soapbox in a crowded centre of a city, screaming all kinds of private things.
@bonifartius @wholemilk This is the other dangerous thing to dogpiling and harassing anybody who makes these tools.
It sends a message to vulnerable people that this platform is more private than it actually is. This leads those people to make incorrect decisions that could ultimately affect their health and safety.
It's a very similar problem to everyone blocking infosec.exchange because the cybersecurity equivalent of the weather service made an account. If people are actually afraid of the government "spying" on their public posts, they need to understand that nobody with nefarious intentions is going to use the front door or clearly announce themselves.
While y'all were blocking people by user agent, IP range, instance, or whatever, any actual threads were scraping the HTML frontend, the RSS frontend, the public API endpoints, or the public API endpoints of *any* server you talk to.
Telling people that what they say here is private is lying. Using that lie as justification to harass others is disgusting.
@r000t
side question: do you mean relays by firehose feeds?
@wholemilk
@r000t thanks for the explanation! :)
@wholemilk
@bonifartius @wholemilk Relays are fine too, in fact they're more efficient than sitting on firehose feeds. But people who think ActivityPub is private don't use relays.
Every instance serves an API endpoint for both the local and federated timelines. While they can be disabled for public users, I have found that for Mastodon, blocking the http endpoints does not disable the websockets endpoints. The websockets endpoints are more efficient anyway.
"Firehose" would usually refer to the federated timeline. It's called that because the content obviously comes out very, very quickly, and in large volume.
Even if a given instance turns off all of these endpoints, their posts can still leak; It only takes *one* instance they interact with, to not disable those endpoints.