 Tbh, the whole twitter rate limit thing is interesting from a privacy standpoint. Pixelfed has limited apis for anon users and required login for certain actions, and now I’m kind of conflicted. The point of this was not to create a walled garden, but rather to deter mass crawling, this is why we also return empty outbox and follower/following activitypub collections. Maybe a privacy friendly default with the option to make your public data more accessible via api is a better solution, wdyt? 11 comments
@dansup PixelFed doesn't seem like a walled garden to me. Anyone with any account in the Fediverse can access it, so I think it is ok the way it is ... But I would support your thoughts too! ☺️  @dansup you can prevent mass crawling without affecting regular users by setting reasonable rate limits. Twitter's limits are not reasonable and that's the entire problem. For example, 1 post per second with a burst limit of whatever you need to load the front page is more than enough for humans but painfully slow for crawlers.  @dansup I think it's a bit of a different situation for Pixelfed too, since Pixelfed deals with more personal photo updates than Twitter's text based statuses :)  @dansup privacy should always be by default, with the settings explained as clearly as possible in the onboarding process, imho.   @dansup I would just question whether that's a feasible goal to achieve. Not sure how well it works with Pixelfed currently, but making content publicly available to anyone who wants to view it (even through other federated servers) may just be fundamentally incompatible with any reliable way to prevent scraping. And promising privacy features that are impossible to actually uphold may be counter-productive. (For instance, how Snapchat's ephemerality has always been possible to circumvent.)  @dansup Mastodon has an opt-in for search engine indexing. That seems reasonable to me. |
Gregory's Server
@dansup opt-in publicity + a privacy healthcheck feature for users would likely be a good idea!