We have paused all crawling as of Feb 6th, 2025 until we implement robots.txt support. Stats will not update during this period.
Robots.txt is a lot like email in that it was built for a far simpler time.
It would be better if the server could detect bots and send them down a rabbit hole rather than trusting randos to abide by the rules.
It was built for the living, free internet.
For all ita dark corners, it was better than what we have now.
stoped
Well, they needed to stope. Stope, I said. Lest thy carriage spede into the crosseth-rhodes.
Did someone complain? Or why stop?
No idea honestly. If anyone knows, let us know! I dont think its necessarily a bad thing, If their crawler was being too aggressive, then it can accidentally DDOS smaller servers. Im hoping that is what they are doing and respecting the robot.txt that some sites have.
Gotosocial has a setting in development that is designed to baffle bots that don’t respect robots.txt. FediDB didn’t know about that feature and thought gotosocial was trying to inflate their stats.
In the arguments that went back and forth between the devs of the apps involved, it turns out that FediDB was ignoring robots.txt. ie, it was badly behaved
Forced to use https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list to see which instances are the most active
