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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Technology
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You'd think so.
But it's not flagged as hidden. Instead you use CSS to set display as none. So the bot needs to do more than look at the direct HTML. It needs to fully analyze all the linked HTML, CSS, and even JavaScript files. Basically it needs to be as complex as a whole browser. It can't be a simple script anymore. It becomes impracticality complicated for the not maker.
This might work against very generic bots, but it won't work against specialized bots. Those wouldn't even need to parse the DOM, just recreate the HTTP requests.
Which is why you'd need something else for popular sites worth targeting directly. But there are more options than standard capta's. Replacing them isn't necessarily a bad idea.
This is what I'm worried about. As the fediverse grows and gains popularity it will undoubtedly become worth targeting. It's not hard to imagine it becoming a lucrative target for things like astroturfing, vote brigading etc bots. For centralized sites it's not hard to come up with some solutions to at least minimize the problem. But when everyone can just spin up a Lemmy, Kbin, etc instance it becomes a much, much harder problem to tackle because instances can also be ran by bot farms themselves, where they have complete control over the backend and frontend as well. That's a pretty scary scenario which I'm not sure can be "fixed". Maybe something can be done on the ActivityPub side, I don't know.
That's where simple defederation happens. It's mostly why behaww cut off lemmy.world.
What if you have 100s or 1000s of such instances? At some point you defeat the entire purpose of the federation.
That's when you go to a federation white-list, instead of black-list.
I foresee islands of instances not federated with each other, like cities without a road connecting them. There could be an island of instances that will be full of bots and illegal shit with open sign ups, and there will be other islands with stricter requirements, effectively no bots run by people who want good social media.