this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2023
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Security through obscurity raises it's head again.... we've been down this fraught road so many times.
If control is wanted over this privacy/discovery balance, better build it in fast. Or, third parties that prove themselves significantly more useful than what is built in will soon take over, once the network reaches a significant size. Search becomes a key feature of every network and communication/sharing platform there is.
Unless of course the hope is that by limiting the utility of the network it remains small and therefore obscure and less used as a whole.
The linked article is thoughtful and covers many of these points from multiple sides already though.
Nah, it's not security through obscurity. No one thinks their posts are secure. The goal is to not make them trivially available to people with intent to cause harm. Yeah, bad faith indexing instances will always exist, but they don't enable trivial drive by harassment, and that's the status quo people are trying to keep.
@ragica @ada Google's already on the case for both instances I use. But hilariously this link won't work in some countries, so just trust me here...screenshot below shows my search results, which are plentiful. (alt text: screenshot of Google search results for my home instance, The Pit, searching for "bikes") https://www.google.com/search?q=site%253Athepit.social+%22bikes%22
Again though, that's not what people are worried about, because it's not where most harassment comes from. On twitter for example, people would have saved search terms, and then almost in real time, they'd drop in and harass people talking about whatever topic they want to troll. That's the behaviour people are trying to stop, and someone being able to hit up google to track a specific user or instances content down isn't enabling that behaviour.