Private and Public Mastodon
This idea that you create privacy by leaving the search feature out of the software is silly. Yes, to some extent security through obscurity does work, and trying to maintain an anti-sharing culture might reduce the spread of your information. But is that really what you want to rely on?The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever).In both cases, you're crippling the software to add an illusory safeguard, which doesn't actually stop bad actors from having access to your posts and hence the ability to record and rebroadcast them.You know who got the system right? Facebook. Private by default, but the user can decide exactly who can see each of their digital objects. It's easy to define groups of friends, allow sharing to friends-of-friends, one person, the whole world, whatever. The concept of friends (bilateral agreement to share information) makes way more sense than this "follow" thing.I want my open-source, federated, Facebook already.Edit: Although, I did just have a flashback to when Facebook announced Graph Search... which lasted about a week until searches that actually worked were deemed creepy and they backpedaled into the stone age. It's so frustrating how these technologies succeed or fail based on fashion rather than technical merit.