None of my accounts show any search hits for eclipse phase. Given Mastadons user base, I would have thought an RPG written by Socalists and about a semi-post scarcity society and alternate governance models would be more popular here...
On and transhumanism and you can play anthro characters.
#rpg #rpgchat #roleplayinggames #roleplay #tabletoprpg #tabletop #tabletopgames #eclipsephase
@Canageek It's one of my favorite EPG settings. Also Infomorph is on here (though I don't believe he uses this service much).
@Canageek RPG. Apparently I can't type.
@craigmaloney The whole idea of only searching tags is really dumb, to be honest. I'm glad Twidere is able to do full-text search. Also problem might be federation fail, which commonly hit searches.
For example search #Warhammer. mastodon.weaponvsac.space, wandering.shop and cybre.space get 0 or 1 hit. octodon.social gets a TON of hits.
@Canageek Meh, I understand the reasoning but yeah, it can be a bit of a pain to find anything again.
@craigmaloney I don't? What is it?
@Canageek UNfortunately full-text searching can be used to find certain posts to harass folks. It's a protective measure.
@craigmaloney .... That is really dumb. You can't enforce it, as evidenced by the fact Twidere has it built in. So harassers can still do it, but it inconveniences everyone, and the is no way to tell if people are doing it. The are commend line clients- log the federated timeline, then run grep on that.
@Canageek @craigmaloney You wouldn't even need to write or use an actual Mastodon client. Masto publishes a user's activity as an Atom feed; other instances subscribe to this feed to get their toots. But anyone who wants to can also subscribe to it, and then all you need is a routine for parsing Atom (not hard, it's just namespaced XML) and dumping the content into a flat file or database or whatever. Put that on a cron job and boom, you're done.
@bea @jalefkowit @craigmaloney Nah. It will happen less often until someone writes a tool for it, then it will be common, and we still won't have full text search.
@Canageek @jalefkowit @craigmaloney that will be an unfortunate day!
when it comes though i hope i'm well enough to take pleasure from writing a patch that will fuck that tool up~
@bea @jalefkowit @craigmaloney As it has been explained to me, can't be done. Just download the timeline atom feed to your PC then run a search on it there.
@Canageek @jalefkowit @craigmaloney for now? sure
not hard to change the way that works to make it hostile to an indexer though
probably can detect such an indexer as well
like i said, i hope when the time comes i feel well enough to enjoy the challenge
other instances can do what they will including have fulltext search
but i won't have my instance being indexed for the benefit of anyone but my users i think
@bea @jalefkowit @craigmaloney So you'd have to break federation then, right?
@Canageek @jalefkowit @craigmaloney mm no, i'm pretty sure it can be avoided
@bea @jalefkowit @craigmaloney Might want to talk to @craigmaloney about they? Individual user feeds are public atom based on the one he just sent me
@Canageek @jalefkowit @craigmaloney craig has been tagged in this whole conversation...
@bea @jalefkowit @craigmaloney Install one if the commend line clients. Log all toots in the federated timeline to disk. Run grep on it?
I'm told it is even easier with atom feeds?
@Canageek @jalefkowit @craigmaloney if you have a well behaved client or act like a well behaved client you miss all the data from the past and have to process everything at realtime
i think for anyone who wants to be an asshole this is already a pretty serious setback
@bea @jalefkowit @craigmaloney .... Yeah, this the logging to disk. Then once you have a log run grep? What an I missing?
@Canageek @bea @craigmaloney If you can't get the data for the entire instance out of it easily, it's harder to identify individual targets within the herd for harassment.
(If you already have a target identified, you're already past the point where anything related to search could stop you.)
@jalefkowit @bea @craigmaloney Doesn't Mastodon already provide that? Isn't that what the federated timeline is? I mean, I'm looking at it. If text arrives on my computer the must be a way to log and then search it.
@Canageek @jalefkowit @craigmaloney sure but then you have only the data for the present and the future
when to identify individuals for some nefarious purpose you want data from the past
@craigmaloney @jalefkowit @Canageek also this is not quite the whole story because the local and federated timelines contain only public posts
@bea @craigmaloney @jalefkowit Ok. So if I was building a search for myself to find people to talk about D&D with these are all features. I wouldn't see people who wanted to be left alone or who are no longer active.
@bea @jalefkowit @craigmaloney Oh sure, that would be harder. But a) If you set it up now and have a big enough hard drive in ten years you'll have close enough all the past data, and b) I would be fine with real time text search. I want to find people talking about role-playing games now, not last year....
Plus, wouldn't you just set your toots to not appear on local timeline of you wanted to be private?
@Canageek @bea @craigmaloney It arrives on your computer because you've manually created an account and used it to manually follow a bunch of people.
A harasser _could_ create an account on an instance, then write a bot to log in periodically and scrape the local timeline. That would take some work, but not much.
Admins could theoretically watch for accounts that behave like bots and close them. But then you have to define what "bot like" means, etc.
@jalefkowit @bea @craigmaloney That is more of a barrier. I can string cli tools into bash files but not do anything web based.
Still, the fact there is an emacs client means it wouldn't be hard to capture the public timeline, right?
@Canageek @jalefkowit @craigmaloney you can directly use the library on which the cli tools are built!
mastodon.py is made by halcy, admin of icosahedron (:
@Canageek @bea @craigmaloney If you know bash, you know everything you'd need. A bash script could use curl + awk to crawl a web site and parse its output, including login.
Mastodon also has an API, which can be used to retrieve toots, timelines etc: https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-the-API/API.md
This would be cleaner than scraping, and more robust. But less attractive to a malicious user b/c API requests would stick out in logs.
@jalefkowit @craigmaloney @Canageek @bea Or you could check my email notifications on this conversation. Sheesh! :)
@jalefkowit @bea @craigmaloney See APIs are something I know nothing about. I'm not a programmer- I'm a scientist that used to have to reformat and extract text a lot. So I leaned enough tools to extract and parse it from whatever stupid output it was in to a CSV file then work with it. So on seeing text in screen my first response is save it to disk, then grep it.
@jalefkowit @bea @craigmaloney In also biased as I said stupid stuff on Twitter years ago, assuming it would vanish, or I would be smart enough to make another account before making professional contacts on it. So I'm on the side of, there is no protecting on public things, don't pretend there is as it one day won't be, learn that now.
@jalefkowit @bea @craigmaloney @Canageek I always assume that whatever I say online will come back to haunt me. I learned early on when I accidentally crossposted a response on a thread in alt.cdrom that got sent to alt.caving. The eloquent response? "Blow me". My network admin was amused but decided to let me stew a bit anyway.
@Canageek @jalefkowit @craigmaloney so like
i get this sentiment, i really do, and i used to strongly feel that way myself
however it is possible to affect the degree to which such stuff happens
and i think it's worth doing
like... i do have a whole instance that automatically deletes all toots a while after they're posted
even if it's not perfect (it's not) it still makes things quite different!
@bea @jalefkowit @craigmaloney That feels dangerous to me, as users will assume it is gone, when you have no idea if someone is saving everything to their hard drive. Do people could get a false sense of security. Kind of like Snapchat.
@Canageek @jalefkowit @craigmaloney they know the risks, my about/more is like... half disclaimer
@jalefkowit @bea @craigmaloney (Also, if anyone has suggesting on how to archive public toots that match a hashtag let me know, want to run one before a fiction event so I can make a log of it)
@jalefkowit @craigmaloney So do I just need to know the URL of that feed? What is the format for that? I'd like to play around with this. Would be useful for a fiction event I have planned.
@craigmaloney @Canageek Note also that Mastodon's user profile pages have feed autodiscovery meta tags, so if you hit them using an autodiscovery-capable browser you can pipe the user's feed to your feed reader with a single click.
@jalefkowit @craigmaloney Is the one for the local timeline in general?
@Canageek @craigmaloney I'm not sure there is a separate feed for the local timeline, as that doesn't get federated across instances. You'd need to check the Mastodon source to confirm though.
@jalefkowit @craigmaloney Ah, so no way to get all the messages without manually downloading every atom feed?
@jalefkowit @craigmaloney So how are the local and federated feeds created? They just take all those feeds and mush then together?
@Canageek @craigmaloney This question goes deeper into Mastodon internals than I can speak to from experience, so I can't say for sure.
My _guess_ is that the local and federated feeds are generated dynamically by Masto for each user, based on their follow list. i.e. they don't exist in Atom format themselves; Masto takes the Atom feeds for all the users that user follows and them mashes them together.
@jalefkowit @craigmaloney Doesn't every Mastodon user see the same local feed? I thought that was just every non-private toot on the instance?
@jalefkowit @Canageek @craigmaloney i don't think anyone has the impression it's impossible
but it doesn't have to be impossible for there to be benefit
if it is more of a pain in the ass it will almost certainly happen less often, and that's a good thing