Posts and replies

On Searchtodon, I think it's good the author of it tried. I think its good that the community rejected it. Both things happening are important and meaningful and need to happen as Mastodon grows.

But please, don't utter the word "copyright." The legal status of toots is a complete mess, a total nightmare. Even if we pretend for a moment that copyright is not an evil and harmful institution optimized for protecting wealthy content brokers while making normal creators fight one another, the only way Mastodon works is if you implicitly give SOME of your distribution rights to someone else.

But at the same time, copyright is rubbish and this is our community, so we should make our feelings about things that change that community clear. Folks will probably mass-defederate from instances that run centralized search or history functions. And the twitter expats and folks "making a living in social media" will be baffled why the very notion of creating legibility in the space is terrifying to many people on Mastodon.