LB I do not understand at all how people are arguing this is GTS behaving badly and not scrapers like...
FediDB: how many users do you have
GTS: I'm not telling you don't crawl my page
FediDB: I'm going to do it anyway how many users do you have
GTS: Fifty billion
FediDB: okay thanks
FediDB: hey wait you lied to me!!!
Like idk sounds to me like you should have walked away at "don't crawl my page" and if you get the wrong numbers after that that's on you
Nobody owes you their stats, and when their robots.txt tells you don't scrape my stats and you do it anyway you can't complain that the stats were bad
Honestly looking at FediDBs GitHub there's a lot of complaints about it's scraping behavior in general. Like it will keep repeatedly hitting domains that don't even have fedi servers anymore
And with a server as big as Universeodon missing how good are these stats anyway?
Ultimately the real problem we aren't discussing though is that Dansup is accusing the GTS devs of doing this "for clout", when they are doing this for "leave me alone", which is the opposite of clout.
It's complete bullshit and he should be embarrassed to say it.
Guy steadily gaining more influence over the fediverse with his software and massively unmanageable instance sizes spends most of his time beefing with other fedi devs...I don't think this is actually GOOD for the fediverse.
"This isn't about my scraper ignoring robots.txt and pounding instances that don't even exist anymore with requests indefinitely, it's about them trying to get clout by randomizing numbers (that I shouldn't have been scraping) so big nobody would even believe them!"
And if his accusation is that this completely optional feature was added with "suspicious timing" to hurt him specifically
Then he's probably being overly optimistic about how quickly people update GTS
I'm definitely many updates behind because I am:
- lazy
I also chose GTS in the first place because I am:
- lazy
And it seemed like an easy install (and largely was)