Except iirc, they aren't scraping "properly" (read: efficiently at least, setting aside morality for the sake of discussing this component in isolation), and are causing traffic troubles. If only they took the time to install an actual instance themselves then nobody would care in the slightest (again, ignoring the morality part, for now).

TLDR: they are being dicks about it, bc offering everything we have for free is not enough for them.

[–] scytale@piefed.zip 11 points 5 days ago (3 children)

But if they do it the “proper” way, they won’t be able to grab the data if instances defederate from them, right? And that’s what the majority of instances will do.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Assuming you know which instances are the ones they're collecting data from. It could be any instance.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

You are absolutely correct there, in that hypothetical scenario if they were to attempt to hide their traffic among normal instance activities.

To add a bit more detail to my previous answer, there were some prior discussions about this topic, citing some of the most popular instances of the entire Threadiverse having been targeted by their normal DDOS-like approach:

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[–] Walk_blesseD@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 4 days ago

Good.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 5 days ago

I do not know enough about the ActivityPub protocol to answer that. I did think that federation at least used to be the default many years ago but aren't sure about the current status of that. Indeed detection and subsequent blocking will always be the cat and mouse game that is played but use of ActivityPub might at least delay the former part? And how would anyone find out, compared to e.g. if not a single person household then at least a small community instance just wanting to pull down all the content across the Fediverse to read up on?

[–] MrKaplan@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

of all the scrapers we see, the requests identified as originating from Meta seem to be well behaved overall. they appear to (mostly) be respecting robots.txt where present and their request volume to Lemmy.World is only averaging slightly above 5 requests per minute over the last 2 weeks. they also don't spoof their user agents to pretend to be web browsers, or at least I have not seen credible accusations of this happening.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 4 days ago

Thank you for sharing that data 😊

[–] carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 4 days ago

i mean, that’s exactly what they did with threads, and many instances defederated from it because they didn’t want to have their data scraped by meta