• irelephant [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    I doubt they’re crawling stuff over AP, you usually need a HTTP signature for that, and no bot is going to bother with those.

    Most crawling would just be spamming the web interface.

    • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      If by HTTP signature you mean an SSL certificate signed by an authority, those do not present a burden for bots to obtain any longer.

      • irelephant [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        I do not, ActivityPub uses HTTP signatures to make sure messages and requests from other servers are legit,

        Essentially, it adds a “signature” header which contains a link to a users public key, a list of headers in the message and a signed hash of all the headers and the request.

        There’s a better explaination here: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/security/

        A delicated bot to scrape ActivityPub posts is possible, but generic bots shouldn’t work. If a delicated bot is made, people can block its keys or server anyway.