Mastodon adds indexable flags

2023-09-01
When Tootfinder started seven months ago, the searchability of Mastodon was widely disputed. We wrote in the first blog What a day! about the concerns of Mastodon users and developers, and how we defined the opt-in approach of Tootfinder to reply to these concerns.

Well, the positions of the developers must have moved in seven months. The beta version 4.2.0 adds a new feature that address searchability.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases

The main features that interests here is Add support for indexable attribute on remote actors

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/26485

Written by @Gargron and extracted from #26344, it adds an indexable flag for attributes that is meant to be used to opt in to generalized public search. This does not implement the searching itself, nor does it add the interface for local users to enable it yet.

There is also a comment by @ClearlyClare in the GitHub conversation: The feature is welcome, and the code looks fine to me.

Indexable will be a property of account and off by default.

I am not an expert on the Mastodon codebase which is written in Ruby which I do not understand, but it looks like that at this time, there is only a change in the data structure of the account. Nothing is set in the user interface to allow the user to choose, nor there seems to be any code that exposes the setting in the REST-API.

It is not sure yet if the feature makes the cut into the final version and if it is completely implemented. But when it will be, Tootfinder will consider replacing the current opt-in methods (magic word for account, site rule for instance) with the indexable flag.

How will Tootfinder discover users in the future while there is no global map of all instances? Tootfinder will probably keep the opt-in dialog to allow users to apply directly, but it will also use discovery on the current users' subscription list and index the users who have the indexable flag on.