@HugeNerd there are 12 of them at various entrances to the park. They were installed as part of the 375th anniversary of the city in 2017.juliemargot.com/projet.php?lng

@HugeNerd there are a few of them, at different entrances to the park.

Anyway, my answer is yes. It's OK for people to make code that does new things on the Fediverse.

ActivityPub is made for a lot of different use cases. I really like when people explore use cases we haven't tried yet.

Anyway, even for software that doesn't crawl the API, I think we need to give people the benefit of the doubt. People spend a lot of time and effort making that software -- usually open source, usually for free.

Second, a lot of the things we use on the Fediverse depend on reading that API data. Like user search, content search, hashtag feeds, relays, backfilling conversations, and aggregate data.

I don't even think "scraper" is a reasonable name for this kind of software. We usually use that for screen-scraping software, which takes HTML output and grabs the structured data out of it.

First, ActivityPub has a Web API that is used by federated servers to find out about people, the content they make, and what they've done. That's built in. It's on purpose. You have a lot of control of what is shared in this API. If you are concerned about what you share, you should check your software's privacy settings. There are a lot of knobs and levers.

Many of the replies mentioned "scrapers" as a category of software that's not acceptable. I think this is misguided.

Thanks all. I see a lot of developers getting brigaded for launching new tools on the Fediverse. At best, they're insulted and their motives are questioned. At worst, they're brigaded on GitHub, the Fediverse, or in real life.

Anyways, my answer is "All except those you opted out of".

Setting the indexable flag, and using blocks or opt-out signals, is a "denylist" permission structure; "everyone except these enumerated servers".I don't think we have a good mechanism for an "allowlist" structure; "only these enumerated servers". If I were making a search engine, I'd have a way for someone to opt in manually, even if their "indexable" flag was missing or false.