Amanda Unvarnished

I don’t care if outsiders do full-text indexing on my toots. I am a public figure, and this is my public face.

I do VERY MUCH care if outsiders do full-text indexing on fedi nodes that have their “do not index/data mine” flags set. That’s a violation of consent.

The universodon folks say that fedi folks are creating cool content and should be discoverable. I absolutely agree that fedi folks are creating cool content!

Some folks DO NOT WANT TO BE DISCOVERED. Period. Their reasons are their own and best discussed over a drink. The fedi’s poor discoverability is a feature, not a bug.

The intent behind full text search might be good, but intent is irrelevant. Only impact matters.¹

And I’m saying that as a creator who depends on social media to survive.

Consent, and understanding consent, is important. I’ll be defederating from universodon.com this week, unless they stop this.

¹ No, I’m not quoting my orc stories. My stories are quoting me, who is in turn quoting any number of smart people.

—@mwl

Boss: Why is your work only 80% complete?

Me: Oh, yes! There’s a very good explanation for that.

In my last performance review, you noted that I was exceeding all expectations, but that you were only giving me a 4 out of 5 because you “never give 5s” because “there’s always room for improvement.”

As a result, I’ve taken the initiative to deliver at 4/5 capacity to ensure I’m performing according to your expectations.

As we’ve already established, I’m easily capable of performing at and above 100%, so please let me know once you’ve adjusted my performance rating to a 5 and I will adjust my performance accordingly.

—@Alice

People were getting justifiably pissed off about what felt like a complete “whim” decision to defederate mastodon.social.

Not realizing that no one was announcing defederation, but a Silence. (Also known as a “Limit”)

Silence is infinitely less destructive, and doesn’t break follow relationships, and still allows you to follow people on the other server, it just puts the server in a more ‘restricted’ mode so that randos from that server don’t have the same privileges (to your eyeballs) that non-silenced servers do.

Suspend is what you do when you’re done with that server. When you’ve given up, and when you’ve informed users on your server that you’re defederating a server that has existing follow relationships you’re about to break.

Most of the time that is not a decision that is made lightly especially when there are already existing follow relationships between the two servers.

(This is another reason mastodon.social has little to fear from defederation, but I digress.)

—@oliphant