mccSo there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there. He was asked what people should do if we don't want to be mulched as content for his summary feeds. He said we should block him. I replied, I can do that, but that only stops *you* from running the tool on me, how do I prevent *your other users* from running your tool on me? He blocked me.
It is possible he interpreted the way I phrased my request as rude. I may have said something like "you are selling us as meat".
Anyway, the fact he's blocked me *partially* solves my problem, in that now he cannot LLM summarize me anymore, but the problem that possibly eventually a *second* person would use his tool remains unresolved.
Honestly, it's baffling that he added Mastodon support at all given that he's been here for years and thus saw some of the MANY YEARS of conflict and debate about the idea of people merely *archiving* or *indexing* Mastodon posts. And then he goes an uploads an auto-LLM-mulcher tool. IDK.
Doctor0710@mcc hey, so full disclosure, I do something similar, completely locally, without sending anything out to any provider, all inference is happening on my machine, and the results are saved to an HTML on my machine only. It loads the top 120 public posts on Mastodon, and filters them to 3 categories as a morning and evening recap of notable events. Just want to let you know that even without any credentials it's possible to see top public posts on Mastodon, which is how I first saw this post too.
@mcc there's a "quiet public" visibility option which should hide the post from unauthorised clients, maybe that should be the default, with a warning on the public visibility for posting
Edit: Read through the replies, and found out about the #nobot tag, I just added that to my thing to filter out too. I wasn't aware of that.
justsomeguy@Doctor0710 @mcc Does the #nobot force compliance or is it like robots.txt which gets routinely ignored?
@monstrodosrtiago @mcc I'm guessing the latter, but I only just came to know of it in the last 12 hours. On my thing (it's just an n8n automation with a Javascript node to filter out posts) I made it so if a users bio contains the text "nobot" in any way that post gets entirely filtered out.
@Doctor0710 @mcc I appreciate the response. I'll add the tag to my bio momentarily.