Mastodon 4.2.0 added per-user opt-in search indexing. I love this so much. People here have asked me to enable Elasticsearch on FRZ dozens of times. Of course users want to find toots easily without scrolling through hundreds of them! However, it presents significant privacy issues for people who don’t want their toots to be indexed. Who wants to make life easier for a stalker?

The new feature handles this thoughtfully. I can enable the indexing feature at FRZ, but it doesn’t process a user’s toots unless they deliberately turn it on for their own account. People who don’t want their toots to be indexed don’t have to do anything. I think this is the perfect balance between privacy and convenience: everyone gets to decide for themselves. Well done, Mastodon team. Well done.

Sometimes a creator loses touch with how people use their creation. I worry that Eugen Rochko has found himself in a bubble and doesn’t understand why the rest of us like Mastodon.

Eugen and friends released the new official Mastodon for iPhone app, and users noticed that it doesn’t show local or federated timelines. He responded:

The omission is intentional and I do not intend to add these types of timelines into the app. […] The fediverse is diverse because you can follow anyone from any server. The local timeline plays no role in that and doesn’t even exist in ActivityPub as a concept. Being able to choose a different server has always been about trust for the service provider and rules.

Mastodon makes the internet feel like home again, by @srol@mellified.men

Having been on the service for nine months myself, I can confirm Mastodon is not a replacement for Twitter. It’s much better. It is the first place on the internet where I have felt comfortable in a long time.