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Comment by sen | Hacker News Reader

I saw most of this play out on Mastadon, and OP was absolutely blasted for even daring to try something like this. The response was completely inappropriate, and the level of hate was excessive when OP was very clear from the start that they were trying to find a “good” way to do this and had zero ill intent.

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Yep, there was some really nasty stuff aimed at them - and I've known them for many years, absoutly none of it was deserved and was just hateful vitriol based on typical assumptions off an avatar.

I do get it - these people have been on the Fediverse longer and feel like it's a form of digital colonialisim, but as I've pointed out - if they keep shutting down individuals who do things in good faith, soon when the "BigSocial" comes along and does it anyway, they won't have anyone there to help speak up as they'll have blocked, defederated or just scared people off.

Also the underlying problem here is a tech one - it could be fixed by correctly implementing the "noindex" stuff and working on privacy and consent features. This can't be fixed as a people problem, and certainly won't be by shutting down any attempts to address the problem now

Also TIL that a "FOSSBro" is apparently a thing people now like to throw about.

>FOSSBro

There's a similar term in science: bropenscience (bro + open science). The behaviour is strangely similar, people on the nerdier side who have been doing 'their' niche-thing for a while and are often condescending/aggressive towards newcomers. It's interesting that both FOSS and open science were made to make things more 'open' but sometimes lock/close things down even more.

A lot of people defend this behaviour because a lot of the Fediverse (especially pre-Elon) were there because they were harassed on other platforms, and so discoverability is a negative feature. I don't see how that justifies the amount of vitriol thrown at the author, but that's where a lot of the culture has come from. Some people see any kind of project like this as an attack on their safety, which doesn't activate the part of your brain that's good at reasonable discourse.

Discoverability is pretty much inevitable if the tech allows it.

It's a feature simply too useful to too many. It will get built if it can get built.

I get the desire to be "public but only when it works in my favor" , but it's just not practical. You have to choose whether to be public or private.

But Google already offers full search of most public Mastodon posts -- add "site:mastodon.social" to a Google search on anything in the news, and see what you get. It's odd for people to get so worked up about what would happen to Mastodon if it were generally searchable, and yet not to notice that Google already did that quite some time ago.

Not all posts are public, not everyone is on one instance.

That's optional and off by default. You have to go into settings and tick a box for search engines to index your profile. So, by default, this isn't an issue in "normal" search engines that respect website's wishes.

All of the decisions up to this point have been debated, carefully considered, and there's always a reason why things are the way they are (you can usually find that reason deep within Mastodon's issue tracker). When someone comes in and tries to disrupt that fine balance that took years of effort to achieve, people get very hostile, sometimes to an unreasonable degree.

A suggestion of some sort: just don't fuck with other people's posts. At all. If you want to fuck around with fediverse, build your own presentation in any way you want to and interact with other people. But don't try building "meta" projects like search engines, stats, analyses and what not. Even if your intentions are good and you do your damn best to respect everyone's wishes, you will still piss off a lot of people. The only way to avoid that is to make your product opt-in, but then pretty much nobody will want to opt-in, so you'd just be wasting your time.

Anyone doing anything slightly out of the norm on the fediverse gets blasted. I too experienced this just recently. Being open and responding just gets you even more heat.

100% agree the response is inappropriate.

If you don't do an apology like done here the mob will continue to attack you. So I totally understand why they did this.

The best strategy is to ignore what the minority that attack people say and just block them...

Crazy thing is that a lot of the policing of other people's behaviour is even from people who haven't even been around for long. It's crazy seeing people trying to control other people's behaviour by attacking them and telling them "that's not how things are done here" when they've been on Mastodon for less time than the person they're policing!

It's common for newcomers in a community to try to prove that they deserve to be there by aggressively enforcing/performing community norms.

Can confirm, I was that newcomer. Thought the culture was perfect and thus wanted to defend it. I’m more disillusioned now and focused more on the decentralisation aspect.

> I saw most of this play out on Mastadon, and OP was absolutely blasted for even daring to try something like this.

I'm glad that we live in a world in which some people respond to this kind of social dogpile with defiance and renewed inspiration. Progress depends on highly disagreeable people who gain energy from being told by tut-tutting do-godders that certain things musn't be done.

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