Mastodawn

This person is building a tool (zeitgeist dot blue) that scrapes your ActivityPub feed to generate daily LLM-driven summaries. https://alpaca.gold/@seldo/116286295716964968

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Jeri Dansky 2d ago

@drahardja Note: It only looks at an account's own timeline — so if an account doesn't follow you (or someone who boosts your posts), it won't show up if the account owner uses this tool.

I appreciate that Laurie added support for ways to have the tool blocked for your account (certain hashtags in your bio, the "don't index" flag) once this option was pointed out to him. I'm adding the noai hashtag to my bio!

And as much as I personally hate GenAI, I've long accepted that since my posts are public, and you don't need a Mastodon login to read them, they could be scraped by anyone without me ever knowing it. I don't like that, but it's reality.

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Dave Rahardja

@jeridansky I hear you, but I also try to avoid premature surrender. Just because it’s impossible to entirely prevent public scraping doesn’t mean we shouldn’t establish norms for acceptable behavior. For example, LLM scrapers routinely ignore robots.txt; that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to insist that people respect it.

I think it’s good that we set clear boundaries and expectations, and insist on asking consent; then call out people who violate these norms, even when we can’t stop every bad actor.