Full text search is going to encourage the use of Masto as a tool for storing information. People will make posts and expect to be able to look them up later for reference.

This is a terrible practice, people did this withnthe dead bird and now lots of stuff is either gone, or inacessable.

Masto is not a place to keep data long term. If you have things you need for long term reference then copy that stuff to a website that you run and are in control of. One where you know it will stay.

Basically, stop treating brittle social sites as archival. It never was a good idea, and it never will be.

@jameschip I've never heard this specific take on full text search but you're very right. Whether or not people want microblogging to be ephemeral, it really just doesn't do non-ephemerality well. Not like the million other better options for persistent content.

Whenever someone tries, it feels strange to me. Like browsing the internet as a teenager knowing your parents are logging your search history. You feel like you need to act very intentionally, which makes it harder to have the kinds of organic conversations the fediverse seems to promote. That might just be me, though. I suppose it depends on what you want to get out of it

@jameschip I confess I do that a lot, search my old posts. I make off-line backups of my archive every now and then.

@jameschip That's a people problem, not a technology problem. People will always do the wrong thing.

However being unable to find anything on here without playing "guess the hashtag" is a technology problem.

Day 1 of Mastodon for casual users - it's dead, there's nothing to read, I don't know anyone, the search is broken, I'm off back to Twitter.

But also yes, stop storing important stuff on social media, that's not its purpose.

@james no, it is a technology problem. People will use the technology how the technology implies it can be used.

Allowing people to bookmark and search up toots implies that they aren't impermanent, when they are very likely to just vanish or become inacessable at any moment.

@jameschip I've never understood this mindset of the fediverse being *ephemeral* by design or on purpose.

I see it as ephemeral because of technical limitations... It's a real "ship of theseus" problem, If instances have a short half life, with a large percentage of them dying every year.. over a short amount of time data rot is just going to happen (which is your point)

but if accounts were nomadic or systems were put in place, it's not an impossible problem.

which returns to the main question... should the problem be solved? Is the fediverse bitrot a feature and not a bug? I think it's a bug.

It might be a good mistake, but the idea it was on purpose doesn't sit right with me.

@shlee it is a feature, not a bug.

Account deletion is a feature.
Defederation is a feature.
Moving instance is a feature.
Post deletion is a feature.
Account blocking is a feature.
Being able to delete an instance is a feature.

Bit rot is inherrent to federated networks.

@shlee people setting toots to auto delete after X ammount of time. Theres another one.

Nothing in this place should be treated as archival

@jameschip That's more about self autonomy (or self governance) than protocol? Giving people the OPTION to auto delete isn't inherent part of the protocol...

@shlee this isn't abot protocol but about a feature being added that will imply to people that content should be acessible long term, when that is not the case.

@jameschip Conversely, if you don't want people constantly dredging up things you said years ago, the addition of full text search is a good time to set your posts to auto-delete. (Which is, I believe, good practice for most people anyway.)

@jameschip At this point, I've accepted that nothing is permanent on the internet. There might be a few small things I want people to be able to access long term, but I'm too lazy to run my own server.

@arthur my website roatates through so many versions. The important thing is that I can find the stuff I want to keep and reference.