As we see Apple, Meta, and Google deeply integrate their AI systems deeply into their platforms, browsers, and operating systems, I think one of the competitive advantages of the Fediverse will be that it is place where USERS are in control of how they consume, share, and interact with AI generated content.

This advantage to users relating to AI, I think, will rival the advantage that the Fediverse already sees in terms of being free from and in control of algorithmic manipulation, free from centralized control, free from micro-targeted ads, and free from and free from data mining.

But I am putting some thoughts into how the Federation needs to evolve to better empower users. And I’ll write more about this and soon make two additions to indieweb.social’s “about” sections. One where I commit to never sell the 11,400+ users' content to any AI platform for their training, and the other announcement where I list new server rules requiring posts here to use AI-generated content to either label their accounts as “automated” or add a specific AI content hashtag to their posts, or both.

Lastly, we have already updated our Robots.txt file for this server to disallow all AI-generated content from being indexed by all AI systems we could identify. And we will be continually updating that list. It is an important note: this does not protect your public posts that federate out to the public Fediverse servers beyond this one…

But this should be an important speedbump to protect any direct scraping of public posts on this site. And some speedbumps are better than none.

For other admins, here are the robots.txt settings we added, and always up for notes to optimize this further:

User-agent: Amazonbot

Disallow: /

User-agent: Applebot-Extended

Disallow: /

User-agent: Bytespider

Disallow: /

User-agent: CCBot

Disallow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User

Disallow: /

User-agent: Claude-Web

Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot

Disallow: /

User-agent: Diffbot

Disallow: /

User-agent: FacebookBot

Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended

Disallow: /

User-agent: GPTBot

Disallow: /

User-agent: ImagesiftBot

Disallow: /

User-agent: Omgilibot

Disallow: /

User-agent: Omgili

Disallow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot

Disallow: /

User-agent: anthropic-ai

Disallow: /

User-agent: YouBot

Disallow: /