mccMar 25
So 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.
Show threadStomataMar 25
@mcc @milan can we block this guys IP? zeitgeist.blue/
Show threadmccMar 25
@Stomata @milan it depends on which "we" you mean and the details of the implementation. It's not clear to me if the client API calls come from the IP of the server, the app might run fully in the user's browser.
Show threadStomataMar 25
@mcc @milan it probably runs on the Browser. If it does than there's no way to block it
Show threadmccMar 25
@Stomata @milan It is possible that when the code running in the browser connects, it might give a client name (see preferences->account->authorized apps on your Mastodon instance) that can be used to identify it.
Show threadStomataMar 25
@mcc @milan that would require every fediverse software to block it 😕. That means not possible for now.
Show threadGunChleoc
@Stomata @milan @mcc You can only block your own usage of the tool with that, not other people's usage
Mar 27 at 6:32amWeb
Show threadmcc6d ago
@gunchleoc @Stomata @milan We believe an instance can block any usage of the tool (the specific one hosted by the original author anyway) by the instance's users. I am not making any statement here except that it is possible.
Show threadGunChleoc6d ago
@mcc @Stomata @milan The only way I can think of with the current tooling is for an admin to go on the server and block a user agent at web server level, or somebody to write code for more moderation tooling that we currently don't have.
Show threadmcc6d ago
@gunchleoc @Stomata @milan yes