I am suspending @doingfedtime from my instance. #fediblock
He's published two blog posts that are outrage bait and fuel for brigading, bitterly criticizing open source developers whose choices he disagrees with.
Technical arguments do not justify this type of personal abuse and harassment. We often make bad decisions to solve worse problems; informed criticism is appropriate. Misinformed howling mobs are not. Enough.
Taking the block-evasion one step further, according to the thread the service doesn't set a user agent so it's not possible to block that way.
Again, according to the thread it does specify an ActivityPub client named "Zeigeist".
Would appreciate any feedback from admins about how to block a specific ActivityPub client.
The creator is making pretty clear that it's designed this way to make it harder to block.
Normally, you'd expect an LLM scraper to have a single (blockable) ActivityPub account doing the scraping.
This is designed so that everybody who uses the service has their identities harvested to steal people's data on the app's behalf.
If you feed somebody's posts into your shitty LLM without an explicit and reversible opt-in, you are violating the consent of fedi users.
This "Zeitgeist" app not only violates consent, but it also doesn't have a centralized ActivityPub identity that can be blocked or defederated.
RE: https://alpaca.gold/@seldo/116286295716964968
This guy is crawling your posts to add them to an LLM. It didn’t even occur to him to make the bot check for an opt-in. It’s purely extractive, and he’s mad that you don’t want to supply his bot with content.
#fediblock them and their server
There's a new spam wave of AI-generated slop for SEO purposes, lot of new accounts from various instances. All posts use the following tags:
#BrowserAutomation #AI #TechDeep #WebDev #Playwright
I kinda wish Fedi had moderation bots we could use to mass-block or mass-ban this stuff based on patterns or something.
Friendly reminder: last year I built FediMod FIRES, a protocol and reference server implementation for sharing moderation data.
I haven't yet been able to get anyone to adopt it or even signal intent to adopt. But regularly I see people complaining about the lack of data sharing when it comes to moderation, especially for combating spam, scams, and harassment. The tool is there, please use it!
Whilst I'm not actively working on FediMod FIRES this quarter, I did apply in November for a grant to continue that work, and last I heard a few weeks ago is that the grant made it to the next stage, so I may have some money again to fund development.
It's not 1.0.0 yet, because I decided it needed more work for me to be happy to call it that, but it is usable!
Installation is also super simple for data producers, literally two commands on debian or ubuntu boxes.
Learn more: https://fires.fedimod.org/manuals/reference-server/
RE: https://manganiello.eu/objects/b313379c-83c7-479f-90a3-c19edd7ab69c
Folks, just a heads up: if you harass Palestinians on the fediverse, your account will get suspended if you’re on a server run by decent people and the server you’re on will be #fediblock(ed) by servers run by decent people if it allows such deplorable behaviour to continue. We will make sure of it.
So maybe don’t.
James Renken
Cap Ybarra
The Fedilore Otter 🦦
Joshua A.C. Newman
AlexTECPlayz
Emelia 👸🏻
Aral Balkan
ansuz