Stephen Downes

I know it's a bit after-the-fact but I don't want this discussion of search in the fediverse to go without comment. It comes in the wake of news that "Holos Social quietly shut down Holos Discover, a fediverse search engine built on ActivityPub." Here's the issue: they tried to build a search engine where people consented to having their content searched. But that would require an opt-in. But "The flag that's supposed to signal 'this person consents to being searchable' frequently signals 'this person's server admin didn't change the default.'" And this creates an unworkable environment for a search engine. Now there are ways to simply search the fediverse without member consent, but people don't really want to go in this direction. There's a governance problem here, writes Laurens Hof, not a technical problem, and it's a long way from being resolved.