Are Bots Scraping Federated Networks?

Federated social networks are under siege from bots, with approximately 70% of traffic attributed to automated data scraping. A software engineer maintaining the Diaspora network uncovered that bots from companies like OpenAI, Amazon, and Anthropics revisit the same web pages every six hours to train large language models.

These bots often bypass blocks, raising ethical concerns about the use of internet data. In contrast, older bots from Google and Bing continue to follow traditional protocols. The surge in bot activity highlights the growing demand for training AI systems but also raises questions about the sustainability and ethics of such practices. Platforms must now grapple with balancing innovation and protecting their resources from exploitation.