[rst]

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.

[input_sh]

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.

[bronikowski]

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