• Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    10 months ago

    The fun thing about most of the Fediverse is that all of it is request/response based. You can set up robots.txt and simply not respond to requests if you don’t want certain content to be accepted into certain platforms.

    Nobody does this (yet), but the protocol allows it.

    Maybe someone should write an “ActivityPub firewall” that allows the user to select what servers/software/software versions can query for posts. Banning all unpatched Mastodon servers would’ve prevented a lot of spam, for instance.

    I feel like the Fediverse people who complain about “consent” should probably stop posting to services running blacklist based federation. Just whitelist the servers you trust instead of blacklisting the ones you don’t, that’s the only way you can ever get the kind of consent-based social media with ActivityPub.

    • Zak@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      10 months ago

      If I’m reading this comment right, it’s relying on a mistaken understanding of robots.txt. It is not an instruction to the server hosting it not to serve certain robots. It’s actually a request to any robot crawling the site to limit its own behavior. Compliance is 100% voluntary on the part of the robot.

      The ability to deny certain requests from servers that self-report running a version of their software with known vulnerabilities would be useful.