We have paused all crawling as of Feb 6th, 2025 until we implement robots.txt support. Stats will not update during this period.
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
253 points (99.6% liked)
Fediverse
29796 readers
1828 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
Let's see about that.
Wikipedia lists http://www.robotstxt.org as the official homepage of robots.txt and the "Robots Exclusion Protocol". In the FAQ at http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html the first entry is "What is a WWW robot?" http://www.robotstxt.org/faq/what.html. It says:
That's not FediDB. That's not even nodeinfo.
From your own wiki link
How is fedidb not an "other web robot"?
Ok if you want to focus on that single phrase and ignore the whole rest of the page which documents decades of stuff to do with search engines and not a single mention of api endpoints, that's fine. You can have the win on this, here's a gold star.
Okay,
So why should reinevent a standard when one that serves functionally the same purpose with one of implied consent?
Edit: my problem isn't robots.txt. It's implied consent.
If you are ever thinking, I wonder if I should ask, the answer is always yes. Doesn't matter the situation. If you are not 1000% sure you have consent, you don't. That's just my ethics.
If you want to propose a new standard, go nuts. But implied consent is not it.