Policy on full-text search

I will note that having full-text search available in some capacity for moderation would be useful, but having that power exist seems risky to me.

Perhaps it'd be OK with some mechanism to guard it (thought: task-specific access could be granted by a majority vote on Consensus, making it unavailable most of the time but still available in the case of a severe situation that warranted it)

If we do ever allow full-text search beyond your own posts for non-moderation purposes, I think it should be limited to posts on the node you're on... or users you're following... or maybe only posts you've interacted with? Some of these ideas might be difficult to implement. We should not allow unrestricted search.

akkoma does have an option to remove full-text search from unauthenticated users, but afaik no way to remove it from all users.

The relevant file in the sourcecode, if we want to consider patching it out or adding an option to disable it for posts.

I know Akkoma has full text search built-in. Mastodon requires installing a separate search engine to enable it, which both feels goofy and means in practice not a lot of servers have it. I will say as far as my own thoughts on this subject... it's mixed.

I feel like text search can be extremely useful for staff and users alike (there've been times where i've struggled to find that one post I really liked from cohost), but I can also understand the potential vector for harassment. I can't think of a situation on the fediverse where I've seen it actively used for harassment, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Ultimately, I think in this situation, I will abstain and defer to those who are more knowledgeable on the social aspects of allowing full text search.

Moderation almost certainly needs full text search of public posts, if we aren't exclusively relying on reports. Maybe that should be restricted to an agreed-on set of "selectors" (slurs, etc) but that seems like a bad compromise.

How does full-text search work with ActivityPub? Do instances search their own caches, or do they send search requests to other instances and hope for a response?

What are the advantages of full-text search as opposed to (or in concert with) working on improving tag cataloguing? Could we patch this to be opt-in on users' parts?

full text search is local.

this is the current incarnation of the coc.

i am not sure if policy regarding full text search belongs in this document or in the privacy policy. i brought up having a rule against anyone feeding data from any league node to any ai and everyone agreed this is a privacy thing. full text search feels like a privacy thing to me.

League-wide search is a no-no in my books, but if it can be limited to only the node you're on... hmm, I'll have to think about that. Feels like it could be useful while limiting it's use as a harassment tool, but that's more gut feeling than anything substantive