If you look in your access logs, or /var/log/nginx/access.log and look for user agents in the log file that indicate things like chatgptbot, etc. Then add if ($http_user_agent ~* "useragent1|useragent2|... useragents") { return 403; } to the server block of your websites config file in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/. You can also add a robots.txt that forbids scraping. Chatgpt generally checks and respects that… for now. This paired with some of the stuff above should work.
I love this idea. Will definitely look into installing on my desktop. I’m working on a searxng instance that filters out all the toxic sources that think they own the internet also. Its also very much a work in progress, but yeah, these putzes get too much attention on the internet and anything we can do for our own peace of mind to delete them from pur lives is absolutely worth doing. I put a lot of filters on mastodon to the same end and it has made my social media experience so much more enjoyable.
I think this is a good use case for creating white lists for federation as opposed to black listing the blocked ones and I figured one day it might come to that. We’ll have to put together some registry where new strains nstancea can sign up to be included. I know that sounds antithetical to federation, but there are solutions to the problems threads is creating.
It could easily be forked if they start fucking around, but that is a real danger.
The problem with federating with anything owned by meta is that it is a data syphon. I don’t think we can fully protect ourselves from that. If they want the data most of it is easy to come by by just having any ol mastodon account or running a malicious instance or just scraping what is public and inferring the rest. However we shouldn’t be inviting a threat like that into our backyard. We should definitely not be federating with them. Furthermore it gives them the opportunity to bloat things down with ads or DOS small instances with amounts of traffic and data they can’t handle and they could make it prohibitively expensive to run an instance that federates with them. Nipping those problems in the bud requires showing them the door early.
I am not worried about this. I think threads is going to end up like all the fascist instances. Perhaps they will have more users… Good for them. But the rest of us will defederate and they will become an isolated instance. Which begs the question, why use activity pub at all? I suppose maybe its so they can run multiple servers themselves and piggy back on the infrastructure that was laid down for free. As long as most of us defederate its not going to change much. You could get about as much data scraping timelines now as they could siphon up with federating. So small instances will continue to federate with each other and that will end up being a smaller amount of the people using the fediverse. The only way this matters is if we obsess about numbers. But honestly most of us can’t afford to run a big instance anyway, so obsessing about unattainable numbers is pointless. It doesn’t change the economics at all, it doesn’t change the fact that small instances will federate with each other and not stuff we don’t like. It may change the privacy stuff, which is something we can fix with some vigilance.
I modified my searxNG to basically look through the results for anything on a ban list and exclude those items. But out of the box its just pulling stuff from a bunch of unreliable sources. I think you have to do a lot of tuning by using their built in tools to add sites you want to index and get rid of stuff you don’t. The cool thing is that you can fine tune it though.
There are tons of defendants across Amerikkka in similar situations and the fact that the ACLU is constantly defending scumbags in the name of protecting all of our rights is the most asinine liberal bullshit I can think of. How many poor black people are there sitting in rikers on some stop-and-frisk bullshit, while the ACLU is prioritizing the rights of Neo-Nazis? There are plenty of other ways to address warranties searches and ironically this dipshit would probably benefit from any precedent that addresses this issue, but at the very least… and this is an example of the bar being in hell and them trying to lower… but at the least, don’t provide free legal defense council for society’s best arguments against civilization. But if none of that resonates, just don’t defend people that spend a not insignificant amount of time and respurces to attack the existence of things like the ACLU before and after you defend them. Because when they get off, maybe their next attack will annihilate the right to free council for everybody else in the country. Or as Aus Rotten put it; don’t give them freedom because they’re not going to give you yours. Fuck Nazi Sympathy. Of any kind.