Full-Text Search: Mastodon doesn’t offer full-text search, because it could be a vector for abuse! A harasser could just look up whatever public statuses their victims post. Removing this protects users.
I’ve never seen anyone argue that particular point (wouldn’t you just go to their profile? If they’ve hidden that, wouldn’t their posts be excluded from search?).
The claim I’ve seen is that without it, you can write “Elon Musk” or “Trump” or “Tesla” or the name of whichever celebrity has caused a scandal this week, without a whole army of their fans searching for any post that mentions them and starting a war in the replies, as is pretty standard practice on Twitter.
Whereas if you do want it to be publicly discussed, you’d use a #HashTag and that’s how post discovery is “meant to work” - as an opt-in mechanism.
If you have to censor those terms to avoid this, then you destroy other people’s ability to add them to a filter list in their timeline.
As for the argument about quote re-tweets, though, I was skeptical about that one when I first heard it, but then I looked at my Twitter feed and I didn’t find a single one that wasn’t in the context of “hey followers of mine, look at this moron and how dumb he is!”.
I do see the point that maybe you should reply to them personally and tell them why you disagree - but does arguing on the internet ever actually work that way?
Regarding:
I’ve never seen anyone argue that particular point (wouldn’t you just go to their profile? If they’ve hidden that, wouldn’t their posts be excluded from search?).
The claim I’ve seen is that without it, you can write “Elon Musk” or “Trump” or “Tesla” or the name of whichever celebrity has caused a scandal this week, without a whole army of their fans searching for any post that mentions them and starting a war in the replies, as is pretty standard practice on Twitter.
Whereas if you do want it to be publicly discussed, you’d use a #HashTag and that’s how post discovery is “meant to work” - as an opt-in mechanism.
If you have to censor those terms to avoid this, then you destroy other people’s ability to add them to a filter list in their timeline.
As for the argument about quote re-tweets, though, I was skeptical about that one when I first heard it, but then I looked at my Twitter feed and I didn’t find a single one that wasn’t in the context of “hey followers of mine, look at this moron and how dumb he is!”.
I do see the point that maybe you should reply to them personally and tell them why you disagree - but does arguing on the internet ever actually work that way?
It seems that you can migrate your post history in Mastodon