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.
I wonder what the tool does when it encounters a DM. From his description it seems to just grab the last N posts from your feed, and depending on how the feed is queried (like if his Mastodon client code were written indifferently, or perhaps slopcoded) the feed he queries might well contain DMs intermixed. I wonder if his tool is taking DMs and sending them over the wire to Anthropic and/or Microsoft
Persephone@mcc bet he's not honouring delete messages either.
@mindpersephone The design of the program does not seem to make this relevant. Although I have not tested it, on each run it appears to do a one time timeline slurp through the client API, pass the posts it finds to anthropic/copilot, then discard the posts*. It is unclear that the posts are ever sent to the tool author's server (I suspect not).
* Of course, I expect anything sent to Anthropic/Claude as a query gets permanently retained by, at minimum, at least one state intelligence service.