Don't really have those ideas, but it occurred to me that this Indexable functionality sits right at the heart of that tension point for fediverse developers on what is okay to do with public data and what is not, and where there's often controversy and heated debate.

Indexable is at the same time a honest attempt to communicate something complex to people on how the network functions. And it is a horror UX as it fails to do so. Now its presence means it has become part of that public data, open to misinterpretation, expectation mismatch, building further on something vague.

I think there's nothing in the technology itself that prevents fediverse from becoming just as bad as social media elsewhere already is. The only thing that prevents enshittification in the long term is having those uncomfortable discussions.

In other words socio-cultural aspects and subsequent pressures on technology direction are key to success or failure of fediverse in the long term.

I think it's probably fair for other search engines to follow Mastodon's lead on this, though -- if I make communications action X and its result is Y, my future use of that communications action will be intended to have the same result.

I don't think we have a good mechanism for an "allowlist" structure; "only these enumerated servers". If I were making a search engine, I'd have a way for someone to opt in manually, even if their "indexable" flag was missing or false.

I think search engines, including Mastodon search, should also include an opt-out for their specific engine. You should be able to have an "every search engine except these ones" policy. That can be implemented with blocks, maybe, or could happen by logging into the search engine interface and switching on a "don't index me" checkbox.

It seems like there's a common expectation that enabling "indexable" makes your content available for indexing without additional opt-in to a specific server. This is how Mastodon and other Fediverse servers treat the flag; if you've got the indexable flag set, your public content is indexed for full-text search. (Even if the indexable flag is not set, if you use a hashtag in your post, it's indexed for hashtag search.)

> If you add the "indexable" flag in your ActivityPub actor profile, which content search engines can index your content and show it in search results?

So, I opt in for DuckDuckGo only.

For instance. Just as an example, because I don't think it works that way.

I always read this feature as "do you mind that we do stuff with your public content, or do you rather have we don't".