‘AltMetric’-style services, which track citations to academic papers outside of academic literature—so in the news, social media, etc.—have been quick to incorporate #BlueSky posts, but I’ve yet to see one that includes the #fediverse

@joeroe In a sense, tracking and citing social discourse is the antithesis of fediverse development. I trust my local instance owner's moderation efforts and personal information security, but I am not interested in any overarching repository of my utterances (nor even my citations of papers) being stored for posterity. I think a lot of people would feel the same.

@CadeJohnson I wouldn't agree with that... to me, the core reason for federation is to allow for what we share to be accessed in the format the accessor prefers, not just narrowly on the same platform it originated. In this case, the format would be an aggregator that links URLs in posts to scholarly metadata.

Of course another core tenet of the Fediverse is multiplicity of views, and people could not engage using existing tools, e.g. not federating with the aggregator or setting follower-only.

@joeroe There is a tension between the person who accesses content having choices about the presentation and disposition of the content, and the creator retaining control of that content. I think the perspective of separating content from the control of the creator is one of, if not the main inspirations for replacing the corporate model of social media with the fediverse. When I post content, I may choose to broaden its accessability by, say, adding alt text to an image. But I would not be excited about a system where such alt text is added without my consent - certainly not as long as the content is attributed to me. I think that would extend to systems that sought to index or otherwise make my content more searchable than is already the default (where I can remove it from the fediverse, if not from external internet archives).