Post #4472961

2026-08-09 23:41 UTC

My question: what is to say that de-indexing needs to be a binary decision? Is there not a way that I can create a decoy website— say, a barebones list of the sort of thing someone might receive from me— but quarantined from my actual website or content? Said page would serve to prove to a human that I exist, and tell them how to find it, but contain nothing of value to corporations. Meanwhile, the real site black-holes anything resembling a robot, and explicitly requests to be de-indexed.

Replies (2)

@Haste@mastodon.social 2026-08-09 23:44

I would not be surprised to learn there’s already a term for this, and would be even less surprised to learn that it is a bad idea, or that it is ineffective at preventing bad behavior. Hell, I can even think of some new harms that filling the internet with such meat-shields might cause. But if there’s one thing I know about the fediverse, it’s that if I say something stupid out loud, a thousand of you will promptly correct me, and I might learn something interesting. :)

Open ##4472960
@GroupNebula563@mastodon.social 2026-08-10 02:08

@Haste@mastodon.social what i will say is that there are still good indexing bots out there, like the one belonging to https://marginalia-search.com - my general approach has been to allow indexing but disallow any AI crawlers, and send those to a honeypot. if you convince the AI crawlers that the honeypot *is* the website instead of just trying to block them off completely, they're less likely to try and evade detection because they think you're welcoming them

Open ##4473055