Community members pointed out that the indexable flag is enabled by default on many instances, which means that a significant number of accounts with the flag set never made a deliberate choice to be indexed. The flag that’s supposed to signal “this person consents to being searchable” frequently signals “this person’s server admin didn’t change the default”, and on a protocol-level, there is no difference between these two options.
Maybe Mastodon could get the user to set this during onboarding. Then no one can say they didn’t choose.
















If it looks like something that could happen again, rather than a one-off fluke, USA would have to change their whole naval doctrine. The strategic arms balance of all countries would need to be reassessed.