This post isn't as long a read as the table of contents might suggest. We begin with the decision by Mastodon developers and admins to disallow search on the federated social network. There are many reasons for this; privacy is just one concern. And in any case, Tim Bray writes, Mastodon can't prevent search. Its privacy protection, he says, is terrible. Every post has a unique URL that can be accessed on the open web. So what we have here, he says, is not a technical issue, but a social or legal issue. And so he recommends that the fediverse implement some sort of content licensing mechanism. I personally think that's a terrible idea. First of all, the fediverse needs lawyers the way a submarine needs a screen door. Second, content is already protected by existing law, which is simply ignored by scrapers and indexers. Third, licensing just creates a bunch of loopholes for these services to crawl through, just as we have seen in the case of open educational resources. And fourth, creating a whole licensing layer over the fediverse makes it even more difficult to join and use, which is not what it needs right now.
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