@no_brainer @alice @evan would some sort of "robots.txt" mechanism help here where accounts can signal if they consent to certain aspects and ethical instances respect those controls and any not ethical instance that rejects those controls could e.g be auto blocked by default by ones own instance for example.
@bitbraindev @alice @evan You have to opt out by adding #NoTagsPub to your profile. But this is the wrong way!
I would like to ad a #YesTagsPub if I want to opt in!
@no_brainer @alice @evan yeah agree. robots.txt basically works like this: "hey bots please do not index this website, thanks" and if anyone ignores that they can be called out publicly/blocked etc. but not having any mechanism like this whatsoever to begin with seems odd and is a missing part here. Enforcement would work through social pressure (like robots.txt)
Jun 29, 2026, 2:47 PM@no_brainer agreed. how many fucking tags are people supposed to add to opt out of shit? Like at what point does it become impossible to add them all because of the character limit? lol
This attitude that the end justifies the means by a foundation in Meta's pocket is not going to end well for the fediverse.
@fromjason @no_brainer @bitbraindev @alice @evan I looked at the thing to see what it's about, and at first I didn't get its purpose, or the problem, but then I connected the dots. If you generally post tags with objects, like # thing, then the bot would be called @ thing, which would be kinda strange to see boosting your posts, but nothing really bad. However, if your hashtags are names instead, that's very creepy, way worse and feels like impersonation attacks. So yeah, first, why isn't this opt in? sure, it limits discoverability and all that, but like, the price is too high for a tiny bit more discoverability, there are privacy risks and so on. But also, especially because we have actual relays and we can follow hashtags, at least on mastodon, what's the point of doing this, if not trying to build a global graph or database of the entire fedi? Yeah, this does sound like one of those crawlers/bots, even if the purpose is different...or is it?
@fromjason @no_brainer @bitbraindev @alice @evan also it's my bloomin profile and i don't want to pollute it just because they invented something I don't want
@bitbraindev @no_brainer @alice @evan
See broader website hosting for why the honour system is no way to develop web standards.
@fennix @no_brainer @alice @evan my point is that it's better than not doing anything at all (see OP post about what happens if you let things go unchecked completely)
@bitbraindev @no_brainer @alice @evan
The alternatives to relying on the honour system don't reduce to "do nothing". There aren't only two options. Advocating for a "trust us to be well behaved bro" model amidst the largest breakdown of that exact thing in web standards is, to put this politely, out of touch.
Naming and shaming, defederating the scumbags, etc., are all valid ways of dealing with these problems. Other more aggressive approaches unfortunately lead to closed off communities, which are counter to what many people believe the internet should be.