So there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there.
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@mcc it was bound to happen
though I believe servers could mitigate this by placing limits on number of querries given user/ip/subnet/userahent could perform. Thoyhg that would impact people behind NAT, thoes who want to scroll and read bit longer, and probably bots would just go around it by adding longer sleeps between querries.Still, in the end if your client can display toots or other activities, so can bots.
@jablkoziemne The fact that anyone could have done this does not make doing it okay
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@leberschnitzel A proposal I made before the block was that he could add everyone who uses the tool (as the tool does involve ingesting your login info) to a Bluesky list, so we could subscribe to that as a blocklist. His response to that seemed to be that the thing I wanted was inherently unreasonable. So should I block these folks or not block them? Strange.
@mcc it's very clear that he doesn't care about consent
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@mcc it would appear to do no filtering of DMs https://github.com/seldo/zeitgeist/blob/main/app/api/mastodon/timeline/route.ts#L49
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@mcc it would appear to do no filtering of DMs https://github.com/seldo/zeitgeist/blob/main/app/api/mastodon/timeline/route.ts#L49
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@mcc Yeah. There's a thing going on here where that hits people in a sore spot (LLMs) that is in many ways out of bounds (you can't actually control other people's tools); the place it gets dicy is when you're running a service so you're promoting the use of the tools.
But in general, I'd be real mad at anyone who tried to control what I used to read with.
@aredridel @mcc I had a similar response to quote permissions: what good is turning off quoting for a public post when others can still use their "tools" to link to it? Someone explained to me that it's about making it easy to respect other people's wishes, for those who are inclined to do so.
Maybe it would be nice if this person added a more effective opt out mechanism? Or made their bot opt in? You'd still be free to implement your own LLM reading tool if you really want to.
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@GroupNebula563 @cass I am fairly certain if an instance wanted to do this it would be possible. Go to Preferences->Account->Authorized Apps. It knows the names of all the clients you've used. An instance surely could not prevent someone from downloading the source and running their own instance with a changed client name, but I feel confident the instance *could* prevent users from using the main version of the app uploaded by its original author.
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@GroupNebula563 @cass I am fairly certain if an instance wanted to do this it would be possible. Go to Preferences->Account->Authorized Apps. It knows the names of all the clients you've used. An instance surely could not prevent someone from downloading the source and running their own instance with a changed client name, but I feel confident the instance *could* prevent users from using the main version of the app uploaded by its original author.
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Anyway, the fact he's blocked me *partially* solves my problem, in that now he cannot LLM summarize me anymore, but the problem that possibly eventually a *second* person would use his tool remains unresolved.
Honestly, it's baffling that he added Mastodon support at all given that he's been here for years and thus saw some of the MANY YEARS of conflict and debate about the idea of people merely *archiving* or *indexing* Mastodon posts. And then he goes an uploads an auto-LLM-mulcher tool. IDK.
@mcc I don’t know who this person is, so maybe it’s obvious that they participated in those debates, but it’s fully possible for a person to be on Mastodon for a long time and read a completely different set of posts than me.
There are very many people on Mastodon, and there are bound to be many different ”communities”. Even though we post in this huge undifferentiated heap without any ”forums” or ”groups”, we choose who to follow, and we get posts from exactly them.
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@mcc it would appear to do no filtering of DMs https://github.com/seldo/zeitgeist/blob/main/app/api/mastodon/timeline/route.ts#L49
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@mcc I don’t know who this person is, so maybe it’s obvious that they participated in those debates, but it’s fully possible for a person to be on Mastodon for a long time and read a completely different set of posts than me.
There are very many people on Mastodon, and there are bound to be many different ”communities”. Even though we post in this huge undifferentiated heap without any ”forums” or ”groups”, we choose who to follow, and we get posts from exactly them.
@ahltorp Well, that's true. It would have been more appropriate if I'd said "he would have had the opportunity to have seen" instead of saying "he thus saw". However, this was already a long and wordy post, and Mastodon.social has a character limit
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@mcc ...okay, THIS finally convinced me to set my toots to auto-expire.
What a nightmare.
@Legit_Spaghetti @mcc the problem is precisely that readers which copy your feed remove your chance to delete or expire. I'm followers only for that reason; some crypto guy put in his website, delete impossible, everyone's last few public posts.
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So there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there. He was asked what people should do if we don't want to be mulched as content for his summary feeds. He said we should block him. I replied, I can do that, but that only stops *you* from running the tool on me, how do I prevent *your other users* from running your tool on me? He blocked me.
…was this person not here for any of the various Fediverse meltdowns over scraping/searching/indexing? Or aware of any profile signals that people don't want to be indexed? Or even the least bit curious about robots.txt?
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…was this person not here for any of the various Fediverse meltdowns over scraping/searching/indexing? Or aware of any profile signals that people don't want to be indexed? Or even the least bit curious about robots.txt?
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So there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there. He was asked what people should do if we don't want to be mulched as content for his summary feeds. He said we should block him. I replied, I can do that, but that only stops *you* from running the tool on me, how do I prevent *your other users* from running your tool on me? He blocked me.
@mcc I think the issue is not so much the tool -- anyone can make it, so it was made -- but that any post on social media is inherently public among the people you choose to share with. Since you can't (and probably shouldn't) dictate how they process your posts, you must accept the loss of control. You can't stop a state actor from scraping everything you publish, for example. Your only recourse is to limit sharing.
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So there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there. He was asked what people should do if we don't want to be mulched as content for his summary feeds. He said we should block him. I replied, I can do that, but that only stops *you* from running the tool on me, how do I prevent *your other users* from running your tool on me? He blocked me.
@mcc yikes! the way all this is going makes me want to live in a cave!
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So there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there. He was asked what people should do if we don't want to be mulched as content for his summary feeds. He said we should block him. I replied, I can do that, but that only stops *you* from running the tool on me, how do I prevent *your other users* from running your tool on me? He blocked me.
@mcc This happens because the premise of the Internet is wrong.
The identifier is e.g. an email address, that can be created by the thousands by one person.... -
Anyway, the fact he's blocked me *partially* solves my problem, in that now he cannot LLM summarize me anymore, but the problem that possibly eventually a *second* person would use his tool remains unresolved.
Honestly, it's baffling that he added Mastodon support at all given that he's been here for years and thus saw some of the MANY YEARS of conflict and debate about the idea of people merely *archiving* or *indexing* Mastodon posts. And then he goes an uploads an auto-LLM-mulcher tool. IDK.
@mcc hey, so full disclosure, I do something similar, completely locally, without sending anything out to any provider, all inference is happening on my machine, and the results are saved to an HTML on my machine only. It loads the top 120 public posts on Mastodon, and filters them to 3 categories as a morning and evening recap of notable events. Just want to let you know that even without any credentials it's possible to see top public posts on Mastodon, which is how I first saw this post too.
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It is possible he interpreted the way I phrased my request as rude. I may have said something like "you are selling us as meat".
@mcc I had an exchange with someone a few back who used an LLM to "analyze" my posts and then tagged me in this "character profile" (I think to try and shame me into agreeing with him about something stupid?) and honestly it was really fucking weird. I wonder if it was the same guy, because he was an argumentative douche.
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@mcc hey, so full disclosure, I do something similar, completely locally, without sending anything out to any provider, all inference is happening on my machine, and the results are saved to an HTML on my machine only. It loads the top 120 public posts on Mastodon, and filters them to 3 categories as a morning and evening recap of notable events. Just want to let you know that even without any credentials it's possible to see top public posts on Mastodon, which is how I first saw this post too.
@mcc there's a "quiet public" visibility option which should hide the post from unauthorised clients, maybe that should be the default, with a warning on the public visibility for posting
Edit: Read through the replies, and found out about the #nobot tag, I just added that to my thing to filter out too. I wasn't aware of that.
