A new #Mastodon search engine, @fedisearch went up several days ago, only to disappear, seemingly under pressure from other users. It’s an interesting situation. And personally troubling for me.
For context, the overall vibe on Mastodon is critical of search engines, as tools that can be used to target hate speech. It’s one of the prime examples of the network being designed foremost with harm reduction in mind.
The problem with this is that there seems to be little weighting of opportunities vs costs. Are all search cases negative? Has anyone done any design study to think this through?
And more importantly, how was the decision made? One of the responses to the announcement about Fedisearch states that “most of Fediverse does not want this”. I see this often in discussions about different functionalities (quote tweets!) - users speak on behalf “the community”.
I hope that as Mastodon develops, more sophisticated decision making models will develop. Currently, when people say “the community”, it’s unclear how and where they observe it, and how the community’s collective position is determined.