Guys. Toots are public. Do not labor under the illusion that they are not. You are flinging your words into the digital sea. You can not control what happens to them. If someone wants to, they can archive them, index them, etc.
Literally no one can change this. Decentralization and federation necessitate this behavior. Anyone being able to start an instance means anyone being able to receive those tweets. You can't talk to the world without the world being able to hear you.
.@Irick @oceangrunge but also like, social norms can make them _harder_ to access. It's not a on/off thing, it's "I've got to use a hacky comand line utility to do full text search on instances because the good UI tools are respectful" vs "this site with decent ui and advanced search options won't respect people opting out". Sure, it's never going to be as hard as possible with the current federation setup, but we can make it harder, and at the end of the day, _all_ security is just making stuff harder.
@drcable @oceangrunge
You have no power over what other people do. This is an international community. You can /harass/ people who make tools but they are not going to necessarily share any of your values. In fact, they probably will see your attempts as reason to double down on the omission. The unfortunate reality is that without centralized authority you have to assume the least common social protections across the whole set of participants.