Mastodawn

Mastodon Migration 20h ago

How About Some AI With Your Bluesky?

A tale of two social networks.

Last week some enterprising Mastodon account was discovered to be scraping posts to feed to an AI for the purpose of helping people navigate the Fediverse. The response was swift. The alarm went out. The account was widely blocked and shunned.

Yesterday to great fanfare #Bluesky announced, as a new corporate feature, all posts would be scraped and an AI would now help users navigate the ATmosphere.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/28/bluesky-leans-into-ai-with-attie-an-app-for-building-custom-feeds/

Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for building custom feeds | TechCrunch

Bluesky’s new app Attie uses AI to help people build custom feeds the open social networking protocol atproto.

TechCrunch

Maddad ☑️18h ago

@mastodonmigration

Which mastodon account (s) are scraping?

Paul Chambers🚧17h ago

RE: https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/116296743458567673

@maddad [email protected] was the scraper. Search for post "alpaca.gold" to find posts about the issue.

@mastodonmigration

This post has the link to the LLM announcement post in it: https://alpaca.gold/@seldo/116229243453108157

@paul @maddad @mastodonmigration Appreciate it!

Paul Chambers🚧15h ago

@chad For what it is worth, the dev of that AI timeline tool says it now supports several ways to stop it.

Zeitgeist now:
* respects the `noindex` preference if set on your account
* respects #noindex or #nobots if those are in your bio
* sends a unique user-agent ("Zeitgeist/1.0") if you want to block the client entirely.

@maddad @mastodonmigration

Maddad ☑️15h ago

@paul @chad @mastodonmigration

I was just there reading that and I set the #noindex and #nobots in my bio now.

How could he make that account so you can't just block it?

Paul Chambers🚧

@maddad I replied to your other comment re blocking. Not sure what issue is causing you that. You should be able to block the account like any other account

Maddad ☑️15h ago

Thats what I thought too. There is no block option when I try to block it

Paul Chambers🚧15h ago

@maddad Just to clarify, There is no such fediverse account for anything zeitgeist.blue. The account to block is the [email protected] account, if that is the issue.

Maddad ☑️15h ago

Ok, my bad lol, I went to it using the account name and was able to block it.

Thanks for the tips. 👍

Paul Chambers🚧15h ago

@maddad K. Glad you sorted it out. lol.

Maddad ☑️15h ago

I must be low on caffeine 😆

Paul Chambers🚧15h ago

@maddad Do you need me to call 911 and have them dispatch Juan Valdez and his mule your way with some emergency coffee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7To4Gkwkjk8

1991 Colombian Coffee TV Commercial

YouTube

Maddad ☑️15h ago

😂 it's ok, I have my caffeine drip attached now 😆

The alpaca server only has nine users so I blocked the whole thing.

Paul Chambers🚧15h ago

@BobLefridge I did also but I also added the user-agent to my robots file. Not sure how easy it is for others now to spin it up separate, since the source code is on github, I think. @maddad

Maddad ☑️15h ago

@BobLefridge @paul

Never thought about that, found it and blocked the server.
Why on earth would anyone think it's ok to scrape accounts here.

Paul Chambers🚧13h ago

@maddad Just looked, and they also added a #NoAI tag for Mastodon

🔗 Add #noai to Mastodon opt-out bio tags
https://github.com/seldo/zeitgeist/commit/90b09ad6f683d7059ef4a5c4a3883704a7e71057
@mastodonmigration

That might be something good for people to add to their bios

Maddad ☑️10h ago

@paul @BobLefridge @mastodonmigration

Thats excellent 👍