https://zeitgeist.blue is a multi-social-network app that summarizes your feed for the last 24 hours to let you catch up with doomscrolling. Now with support for Mastodon!
Zeitgeist

Summarize your Bluesky, Twitter, or Mastodon feed

@seldo how can I make sure my posts are never used by this app to be sent to an LLM vendor?
@janl You would need to block me from following you, I suppose.

@seldo you personally or some app account?

(Note that this kind of stuff is not well liked here on mastodon, I got browbeaten into shutting down just a search engine that worked that way, let alone exfiltrate a timeline into an LLM provider)

@janl Me personally, and also anyone who uses the app. It's just a mastodon client, fetching the timeline. It looks like every other mastodon client.
@seldo yes I know. I’ve written about my experiences extensively: https://searchtodon.social/Adventures-in-Mastoland.html
@janl @seldo “Names were called.” lolsob
@seldo Great, what's the user-agent so us admins can start really blocking it? @janl

@aurynn from looking at it, seems that'd be pretty hard. It's authing using tokens into the users fedi account, and then pulling the feed from there rather than reaching out to our servers... as a result you'd only see the UA if a member of your server was using it - which seems unlikely... pretty crappy of them to do that.

Edit: What I also do not see mentioned on the site at all is that this can and will be able to see DM's if you auth with it.

@aurynn @seldo @janl The code is at https://github.com/seldo/zeitgeist.

It does not set a user agent when doing a `fetch()` so it'll just be the default that node has which is probably `node-fetch`.

GitHub - seldo/zeitgeist: A tiny webapp to summarize your social media feed so you don't have to read it all.

A tiny webapp to summarize your social media feed so you don't have to read it all. - seldo/zeitgeist

GitHub

@aurynn @seldo @janl Surprise! "Just a Mastodon client", so he doesn't set one, I imagine it'll just use the default Next.js user-agent header: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aseldo%2Fzeitgeist%20headers%3A&type=code

It looks like it uses 'Zeigeist' as a client name when OAuth'ing, but that would only let you block its use on servers you control - people who follow you on other servers (or who you've DM'ed who use it 😬) still have full access to your posts:
https://github.com/seldo/zeitgeist/blob/2cb6c49581c51161f82e6c94804419609aad7c30/app/api/mastodon/auth/route.ts#L25

@neoluddite @seldo @janl Well, we'll do a PR for it.

Ideally, if we get a sufficient quantity of admins on board with blocking the UA, we can stop the spread of this kind of insipid techbro slopmongering.

@seldo also you could honour the noindex flag on accounts and/or the #nobots hashtag in bios, both of which are conventions that have been established here.
@janl I was not aware of those! I'll add support.
@seldo I also strongly recommend reading my write up (no really) to save you some of the pitchforks that were thrown my way.
@janl There really are a bunch of tedious bastards on here, aren't there? I remember why I left.

@seldo yeah, but also folks feel their consent violated if their posts are going into a place they don’t want them to.

I understand that there is no way to prevent this, but that doesn’t mean these people’s feelings are invalid.

I am fine with my posts being in someone’s search index, but I want absolutely nothing to do with LLM vendors that will do god knows what with my writing.

@janl @seldo AI summaries very much feel (to me) like the difference between quoting and plagarizing/putting words into my mouth.

An automated system that exists entirely to make up things that seem like I would say them? No thank you.

@seldo and yeah, if you were more on here, you would likely not have built this as it doesn’t really mesh with the sensibilities here. (No offence)
@seldo Then fuck off again! 😘
@seldo i sure may be a bastard, but at least i'm not a gobshite feeding other people's social media into a confabulation machine.
@seldo @janl what are you calling people tedious bastards over? I don't get it.
@seldo For as long as you've been developing for the web and what you've accomplished, it's pretty weird how much of a stupid dick you're being about this. It's a product nobody wanted anyway, why do you have to double down when you know for a fact it is bothering people and making them feel like their consent is violated?
@seldo so sorry for being a tedious bastard about the ownership and usage of my data
@seldo @janl Don't let the door hit your arse on the way out.
@seldo you're a net negative to society. did you know that? I want you to think about it for the rest of today.
Yes, when it comes to proper consent not being asked and a very bad opt-out model where I can't see who uses this consent-violating piece of software, I suppose I can be a tedious bastard.
Goodbye then, please reconsider and take it down.
@seldo
@seldo
Could you, please, leave again, and take your violating bot with you?
@janl
@seldo Do us all a favour and leave again, and take your slop feeder with you while you're at it
@seldo @janl But still you've vibe/slopcoded some shitty app to extract all those tedious bastards posts.
If you don' t like it here, what the fucking fuck are you doing here anyway?
@[email protected] @janl Best you fuck off again, you tedious bastard.
@seldo @janl Then please leave again. It's tedious bastards all the way down.
@jbowen @seldo @janl ^^ us, the tedious bastards, wish to be left alone. begone, slopwrangler

@seldo
I'm just a bastard but at least I admit it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRNYp1IiUuE

@janl

Slipknot - My Plague [OFFICIAL VIDEO]

YouTube
@seldo "Thanks for letting me know how to respect people's consent to be indexed" => "People who get irked by me violating that consent are tedious bastards". Please reassess your position here and reflect on why people might be annoyed by this, this reflects rather poorly on your empathy.
@seldo @janl But why did you come back?
@truh @seldo @janl Our data isn't going to harvest itself!
@seldo
I just don't like being fed into slopmachines. How tediously bastardlike of me.
@janl
@seldo then kick rocks
@seldo you came back to exploit everyones 'content' then have the audacity to start talking shit about them? seriously, fuck off back to your beloved VC hellscape
@seldo @janl Imagine a world where you ask yourself why people here are legitimately angry at you. It would require a *tiny* bit of introspection.
@seldo @janl Tedious bastard here, and I agree with most of the rest of us that making goo out of my words and then extruding it back as if it was a reliable representation of me is a jerk move and borderline libel. Just don't. Not here, not on LinkedIn, not on Soundcloud, idrc. If someone doesn't have time to read the twelve lines I wrote, then they have bigger problems than a word smusher could solve.
@wcbdata @seldo @janl 100% this. I mean, I do legit appreciate the desire to build something new for the Fediverse... but most platforms on Fedi are already microblogging services! Are attention spans so damn short nowadays that we need slop generators to make cliff's notes for cliff's notes? And with no apparent way to opt out either?
@seldo Maybe don’t make AI scrapers we can only opt out of by blocking you?
@seldo incredible that this is the conclusion you come to right after admitting you don’t even know enough about the platform you’re ostensibly developing for to safely develop for said platform.
@seldo @janl you should leave again. Why do you even want to read summaries of tedious bastards' posts?
@seldo @janl You should leave again, you bastard. Sending people's content to LLMs that will train on it without their content is evil, and you're a fucking cunt for doing it.
The swearing is just to avoid my content being accepted as input by the AIs, since it doesn't pass the filters. But also, fuck you.

@seldo @janl gods, those pesky bastards with their concept of "consent"

you're still a creepy fuck, my gods

@seldo @janl to make this perfectly clear:

I do not consent to any of my posts, DMs, profiles, etc being processed by this system, whether by you or by any of your users. hard-code me in there as an opt-out if you must.

and then kindly fuck off and go back to Bluesky if you want to play the top in your rape culture scenes

@seldo @janl
Is like to congratulate you on becoming today’s Mastodon Main Character!

All you had to do was make it opt in.

@seldo for fucking REAL i am so sick to death of all the self-righteous jerks on this network who just can’t shut up and leave people alone.

like just the other day someone rolls up and announces they’re scraping fedi posts without consent and feeding them into an AI slop machine. and it’s like, how could we possibly be more clear: we hate this, leave us tf alone, why are you being such a weird bastard about this?

some people, i swear.

@seldo @janl I just faciwitated a widdle itty bitty mass consent viowation and then doubled down on it 😭 and now people are being mean to me 😭 have you considered that I'm the real victim here 😭 😭

gtfo, don't let the door hit you, etc etc

Indeed, very much worth reading! I've got some other thoughts and links in https://privacy.thenexus.today/consent-for-fediverse-developers/

@janl @seldo

Eight tips about consent for fediverse developers

An opportunity? A minefield? Both!

The Nexus Of Privacy
@seldo @janl even with the shit-storm, you are being met with. I at least wish that you could implement those flags just to make the minimum effort to respect the consent of those people since we can't block on source

@seldo @janl

Oh like any real human being understands my autistic ass anyway, let alone after it's been mangled by a sausage-slop machine… NO THANK YOU.

@seldo @janl I know there’s a lot of hate at the mention of LLMs, but having an easy one-tick setting to control indexing makes this much cleaner.

Interested to see it!