Comment on I'm Starting A Search Engine For The Fediverse
0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social 9 months agoI don't think an admin's permission has anything to do with it. If you post publicly on the fediverse, your posts are public. You should have the option to opt out of any indexing (just like you do for the rest of the open web). But saying its ok for you to read this post if it happens to come across your feed but you shouldn't be allowed to find it via a search is ridiculous. Users get to make the choice with each post whether its public or not, but they don't get to control how people consume those public posts.
TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 9 months ago
Reading a post and having a bot thrashing a server indexing everything are 2 different things. If a user used the site like that they would be throttled and if repeated afterwards, banned. It is also one thing to read/interact with a site as that adds value to the site as a whole. A bot that just mass hits links cataloging everything is just a strain on the server an Admin needs to support, with no upside for the instance, as it’s a bot ingesting and no real interaction actually took place.
0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social 9 months ago
This is a completely separate argument and one that we already have mechanisms for. Servers can use status codes and headers to warn about rate limits and block offenders.
A search index adds value as well; that's why this keeps coming up. And, again, there are existing mechanisms to handle this. A
robots.txtfile can indicate you don't want to be crawled and offenders can be IP blockedRednax@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Should a dedicated search not use/index ActivityPub instead of the html interface?
If so, instances can simply defederate from search engine instances. So the point you are trying to make still holds.