概要
Mastodon WebアプリのElkについて調査中に、Searchtodonという分散SNSの検索サービスの実験開始・終了の話題を見つけたので紹介します。
「Ex-Searchtodon: Private Timeline Search for Mastodon」がサービスのサイトでした。
タイムラインで見かけた内容を記憶を頼りに後で見つけることを目的とした、Mastodon用のプライバシーを意識した個人のタイムラインの検索サービス構築の実験目的のサービスでした。サービスのUIとしてElkを採用していたようです。
以下の3の仮説の検証が目的でした。
- UX: OK
- 運用実現性: OK
- コミュニティー (最重要): NG
類似のサービスにnotestockがあります。Searchtodonはタイムラインのフォロイーの投稿を検索できるところが大きな違いに思います。
投稿
2023-01-12の以下の告知で実験サービスの開始が告知されました。
Hi everybody, I’m ready to unveil my year-end-holiday-hack project:
Meet Searchtodon: ***Private*** Timeline Search for Mastodon
It fills a gap that I have been missing over on Twitter as well: “I remember seeing this THING, where was that again?”
It is built with privacy and consent in mind (pls see the FAQ), but is also *an experiment* to see if something like this is accepted by the larger Mastodon community.
Here goes: https://searchtodon.social
I want to be very upfront: if this is something the community rather not have, I’ll shut it down.
But, I think there are three hypotheses worth exploring:
1. User experience: can this be done in a way that users want?
2. Operational feasibility: how much extra burden would this be on instance operators?
3. Community: is this something Mastodon folks at large are comfortable with.
And just to spell it out: this is not harvesting the Fediverse. There is no AI, there is no VC and very likely no monetisation strategy at all.
Finally, big big big thanks to @elk and everybody who contributed so far, without y’all, this wouldn’t have been possible. <3
Oh, and also also thanks to @timbray for doing the hard work of guiding my choices around community consent: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-Privacy-and-Search as well as @darius who helped privately.
サービス内容や実験で検証したい3の仮説について事前説明がなされていました。
その後、開始わずか2日後の2023-01-14に閉鎖されました。
As promised, here’s an update on Searchtodon.
I have shut it down & deleted all data (as of 14:06 CET today).
As implemented, it does not gel *with* the Mastodon community, although the functionality did prove useful to a lot of people.
I’m working on a retrospective that hopefully can inform future experimenters.
Thanks everybody for giving it a try and for all your constructive feedback!
As of 14:06 CET today, Searchton has been shut down and all data has been deleted. ✌️
Hey all, thanks for the mostly constructive feedback. I’m afk until the afternoon, but there will be substantial changes to Searchtodon by end of day today ✌️
閉鎖の2日後の2023-01-16に実験の成果をレポートとして追記しました。
And finally, the big Searchtodon Retrospective: https://searchtodon.social/Adventures-in-Mastoland.html
I erred on the side of including more rather than less and take you through:
– My background and the motivation for creating Searchtodon.
– The initial design and research.
– Recap of *the experiment*, including results and commentary.
– tl;dr: 2 our of 3 hypotheses came back positive.
– Recap of the feedback received (the juicy bits).
– A (somewhat hopeful) look at the way forward.
今回の実験について以下の投稿で、言及されていなかった著作権については、法的に完全に混乱の元なので、触れないほうがいいと指摘がありました。
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.
内容
2023-01-16に公開された後記・成果レポート「https://searchtodon.social/Adventures-in-Mastoland.html」にかなり詳しい内容が記載されていたので、概要を紹介します。
背景
元々、2017年のMastodonブームのときにも似たような実験を行っていて、その際はタイムラインの表示をカスタマイズ (返信非表示、再投稿非表示など) などというようなものでした。例えば、投稿頻度やタイムゾーンでユーザーのリストを自動で分けたりなど、UXの面でまだまだ課題があると考えていた。
詳細プロフィール。SNS: X Twitter/GS=gnusocialjp@gnusocial.jp/WP=gnusocialjp@web.gnusocial.jp。2022-07-17からgnusocial.jpとweb.gnusocial.jpのサイトを運営しています。WordPressで分散SNSに参加しています。このアカウントの投稿に返信すると、サイトのコメント欄にも反映されます。
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