this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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founded 2 years ago
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We have paused all crawling as of Feb 6th, 2025 until we implement robots.txt support. Stats will not update during this period.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Robots.txt is a lot like email in that it was built for a far simpler time.

It would be better if the server could detect bots and send them down a rabbit hole rather than trusting randos to abide by the rules.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 week ago

It was built for the living, free internet.

For all ita dark corners, it was better than what we have now.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It would be better if the server could detect bots and send them down a rabbit hole

Already possible: Nepenthes.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago

ANY SITE THIS SOFTWARE IS APPLIED TO WILL LIKELY DISAPPEAR FROM ALL SEARCH RESULTS.

I’m sold

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

that website feels like uncovering a piece of ancient alien weaponry

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago

Because of AI bots ignoring robots.txt (especially when you don't explicitly mention their user-agent and rather use a * wildcard) more and more people are implementing exactly that and I wouldn't be surprised if that is what triggered the need to implement robots.txt support for FediDB.