Heads-up for anyone who doesn't want their posts scraped and handed over to an LLM.

[dalias@hachyderm.io]

@wyatt @lawyersgunsnmoney Not really. It's an instance with a single-digit number of users who are in his circle of friends. Your call if you think they deserve to be cut off from lots of fedi by association.

[wyatt@soc.megatokyo.moe]

@dalias @lawyersgunsnmoney there are three users on my instance, two of which are active, and one of that subset is me and the other is much more block-happy than I am

[dexternemrod@troet.cafe]

@dalias

@MHowell

+1

[wyatt@soc.megatokyo.moe]

@dalias @lawyersgunsnmoney hmm, npm founder

not somebody i would want to be a friend of a friend of, probably

[loosf@yiff.life]

@dalias

what a shithead

ah yes of course, wanting privacy and consent to be respected is "being a tedious bastard"

[epd5qrxx@mastodon.online]

@paraw

You can't.

Every instance admin would have to intercept API requests and check the origin if it is the Zeitgeist instance and block them.
But you can also just grab the code and run your own instance.

The vibe-coding author mentioned to add #noindex and #nobots support but based on his messages and reactions this won't happen.

[lisoo@eldritch.cafe]

@Barmaid on est d'accord que la personne + son instance + ses alias et les alias de son mari sont/vont être bloqués ?

[iarfhlaitho@mastodon.ie]

@lumi @dalias understands enough to try to circumvent it.

[lawyersgunsnmoney@mstdn.social]

@wyatt @dalias I haven’t blocked his instance, but nothing prevents him from setting up another account. I may go ahead and block the whole thing.

[davidr@hachyderm.io]

@dalias I like the early revelation that he didn't know (or chose to ignore) the first thing about slurping up data. "huh, never heard of robots.txt"

[roknrol@beige.party]

@dalias @SRAZKVT @natty This should not be difficult to do.

[adingbatponder@fosstodon.org]

@dalias The thread here is SO complex one needs to know a lot to react. Can someone just tell me what this is about.. I am so confused.

[mrgrumpymonkey@mastodon.social]

@dalias Blocked and boosted for those who allow me on their timeline, for some reason.

[effika@mastodon.social]

@dalias never have I wanted to see how many times an account was blocked as badly as I do now

[dalias@hachyderm.io]

@davidr robots.txt would make no difference. He's not scraping your posts from your instance. He's scraping the ones that federated to his/his-user's instance via the feed there.

[icewolf@masto.brightfur.net]

@dalias Fucking yikes.

And that implies _anyone_ can scrape your posts and hand them right to an LLM and you'd never know

This is just so gross.

(I mean obviously they COULD either way but this means well-meaning non-assholes could if they don't. like. think about what they're doing.)

[dalias@hachyderm.io]

@adingbatponder This person (seldo) made a web-based social media client that logs into your Mastodon/Bsky/etc. accounts, grabs everything in your feed, and sends it off to an "AI" service for them to turn into a "summary" so you can "catch up on what people are posting" without actually reading it.

When challenged about lack of consent to have our writing turned over to "AI" companies for them to process and keep and incorporate into their models, his response was very hostile and suggested blocking him so he can't see our posts. That only solves the problem for his use of his client, not the problem of other people potentially using it.

[icewolf@masto.brightfur.net]

@dalias I just instance blocked their server (the perks of selfhosting!) but that doesn't help if anyone _else_ uses this shit.

[dalias@hachyderm.io]

@IceWolf Of course anyone who can read them *can* do that. That's always possible. Just like, despite the movie industry pretending all the hellish DRM they impose makes it impossible, anyone can record movies off Netflix just by pointing a camera at their screen. It's impossible to keep someone from copying and sharing copies of something they can see.

This doesn't mean it's socially acceptable or legal. What the AI companies are doing and what the people like seldo feeding our data to them are doing is absolutely illegal, unethical, and a deep violation of privacy and consent. And they need to experience consequences for it.

[jensjot@mas.to]

@dalias He said in a comment in that thread that people would have to block every user of the tool he created, not just him personally. Blocking him may be justified, but it’s not sufficient to prevent toots from being scraped (?) by that tool.