Comment by Bender
1 day ago
I like those ideas. If people are truly operating purely through LLM's then I am fine with being partitioned from them. The LLM operators will provide their reality and their truth. This is all for low trust internet-wide access.
For smaller higher trust communities I don't do any of this. Rather we use basic authentication to keep bots and strangers off the services all together and then regular user accounts on forums and such. That is where strategy comes into play and has been working well for some time.
i guess what i'm curious about is where you would draw the line, and why.
how do you define a user agent? is it desirable or not for users to be able to discover and access resources and communities on the internet using the tools, formats, and workflows that they prefer?
are search bots desirable?
the internet wayback machine?
how do you feel about browser extensions and greasemonkey scripts?
I do not define user-agents, they announce themselves and present a particular behavior. I let them define their behavior and I respond accordingly.
I have no need for search bots personally. If I had a complex site I would build my own search feature. If it was a commercial site I would pay for advertising on popular sites that were of related categories.
Wayback is fun to play with but it's just a toy to me. There is no concept of domain ownership. Most of the snapshots of the domain I am using were from when someone else rented it. They claim to respect robots.txt but that is not entirely true. They crawl and save content even if a site says not to and as soon as the site is offline and robots.txt is no longer accessible they will display all the archived content. This means a person has to park their domain on a server containing a robots.txt that matches their intentions.
Browser extensions are mostly invisible. What is obvious to me is when people are using "reader" applications as web clients. They should be concerned more than me. They are reading random sites run by strangers using apps that may or may not have been battle hardened, reviewed by third party penetration testers and so on. Some of them are vibe coded in unsafe languages.