From the README:
Mastodon 4.x radically changed the frontend, to much dismay from the actual community. It’s now a (slow) webapp, which requires access to lots of API routes that were previously unavailable to unauthenticated parties. It gives the public a much deeper view into your (private) community, both non-techincal (instance home pages now show an ‘explore’ page nobody asked for, that shows public content from instances you federate with. [you have to fully disable trending]), and on a technical level (toots and search API are publicly available allowing for much easier programmatic scraping).
yea I agree. The README says nobody asked for this, but that’s completely false. Discoverability is a constant issue on the fediverse and people have consistently asked for ways to see timelines from other instances.
This reminds me of debates over searchability. There are some people who post publicly, but don’t want their posts visible by most people. It seems like private Matrix rooms would work better for these people
I do not know the exact nature of the changes in 4.x but imho it’s all about preferences. If someone wants this shield, they should use it. And there’s a whole lot of fedizens who do not benefit if someone scrapes the fedi and makes it deeply searchable.
As I see it there’s two extremes in microblogging: Public-square microblogging a la Birdsite, and personal social networking microblogging in your friends network. A Hometown server where people only use local-only toots is an example of the latter. Both are perfectly valid use cases.
Until someone gets burned by posting things they think are private, but due to how the protocol is designed are not. I think these kind of failure modes should be best avoided.
XMPP actually has that right now, as you can restrict publish-subscribe nodes to contacts. Which is different from private groupchats in that you have unified timeline interface rather than separate chats in the few clients that support it right now.
Personally I strongly dislike this context-less mode of communication and very much prefer topical chatrooms and fora, but to each their own. I just wanted to note this exists and encourage people to try Movim and/or Libveria (both are web based) if that is something people are interested in.
Libervia recently also added experimental OpenPGP e2ee encryption to their pubsub implementation.