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  • Jun 28, 2026, 10:17 AM

    @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)

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  • Jul 2, 2026, 5:18 AM

    @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?

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