We have paused all crawling as of Feb 6th, 2025 until we implement robots.txt support. Stats will not update during this period.
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.
It was built for the living, free internet.
For all ita dark corners, it was better than what we have now.
It would be better if the server could detect bots and send them down a rabbit hole
Already possible: Nepenthes.
ANY SITE THIS SOFTWARE IS APPLIED TO WILL LIKELY DISAPPEAR FROM ALL SEARCH RESULTS.
I’m sold
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.
Forced to use https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list to see which instances are the most active
This looks more accurate than fedidb TBH. The initial serge from reddit back in 2023. The slow fall of active members. I personally think the reason the number of users drops so much is because certain instances turn off the ability for outside crawlers to get their user info.
lol FediDB isn’t a crawler, though. It makes API calls.
They do have a dedicated “Crawler” page.
And they do mention there that they use a website crawler for their Developer Tools and Network features.
Maybe the definition of the term “crawler” has changed but crawling used to mean downloading a web page, parsing the links and then downloading all those links, parsing those pages, etc etc until the whole site has been downloaded. If there were links going to other sites found in that corpus then the same process repeats for those. Obviously this could cause heavy load, hence robots.txt.
Fedidb isn’t doing anything like that so I’m a bit bemused by this whole thing.
Did someone complain? Or why stop?
No idea honestly. If anyone knows, let us know! I dont think its necessarily a bad thing, If their crawler was being too aggressive, then it can accidentally DDOS smaller servers. Im hoping that is what they are doing and respecting the robot.txt that some sites have.
Gotosocial has a setting in development that is designed to baffle bots that don’t respect robots.txt. FediDB didn’t know about that feature and thought gotosocial was trying to inflate their stats.
In the arguments that went back and forth between the devs of the apps involved, it turns out that FediDB was ignoring robots.txt. ie, it was badly behaved
Interesting! Is this over a Git issue somewhere? That could explain quite a bit.
Yep!
I think it’s just one HTTP request to the nodeinfo API endpoint once a day or so. Can’t really be an issue regarding load on the instances.
It’s not about the impact it’s about consent.
True. Question here is: if you run a federated service… Is that enough to assume you consent to federation? I’d say yes. And those Mastodon crawlers and statistics pages are part of the broader ecosystem of the Fediverse. But yeah, we can disagree here. It’s now going to get solved technically.
I still wonder what these mentioned scrapers and crawlers do. And the reasoning for the people to be part of the Fediverse but at the same time not be a public part of the Fediverse in another sense… But I guess they do other things on GoToSocial than I do here on Lemmy.
Why invent implied consent when complicit explicit has been the standard in robots.txt for ages now?
Legally speaking there’s nothing they can do. But this is about consent, not legality. So why use implied?
I guess because it’s in the specification? Or absent from it? But I’m not sure. Reading the ActivityPub specification is complicated, because you also need to read ActivityStreams and lots of other references. And I frequently miss stuff that is somehow in there.
But generally we aren’t Reddit where someone just says, no we prohibit third party use and everyone needs to use our app by our standards. The whole point of the Fediverse and ActivityPub is to interconnect. And to connect people across platforms. And it doen’t even make lots of assumptions. The developers aren’t forced to implement a Facebook clone. Or do something like Mastodon or GoToSocial does or likes. They’re relatively free to come up with new ideas and adopt things to their liking and use-cases. That’s what makes us great and diverse.
I -personally- see a public API endpoint as an invitation to use it. And that’s kind of opposed to the consent thing. But I mean, why publish something in the first place, unless it comes with consent?
But with that said… We need some consensus in some areas. There are use cases where things arent obvious from the start. I’m just sad that everyone is ao agitated and seems to just escalate. I’m not sure if they tried talking to each other nicely. I suppose it’s not a big deal to just implement the robots.txt and everyone can be happy. Without it needing some drama to get there.
Robots.txt started I’m 1994.
It’s been a consensus for decades.
Why throw it out and replace it with imied consent to scrape?
That’s why I said legally there’s nothing they can do. If people want to scrape it they can and will.
This is strictly about consent. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should yes?
I guess I haven’t read a convincing argument yet why robots.txt should be ignored.
You can consent to a federation interface without consenting to having a bot crawl all your endpoints.
Just because something is available on the internet it doesn’t mean all uses are legitimate - this is effectively the same problem as AI training with stolen content.
its too bad too with the recent reddit activity.
