A crawler wanted to know who talks to whom on our [Mastodon] server

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A crawler wanted to know who talks to whom on our [Mastodon] server

For two weeks, a client from China's state-run academic network queried our Mastodon instance for who follows whom. Not content — relationships. No project description exists anywhere. Here is what we found, and how to check your own instance.

Blog post:
https://www.martinmuc.de/blog/crawler-who-follows-whom/

Mastodon post:
https://muenchen.social/@martinmuc/117144806957574027

A crawler wanted to know who talks to whom on our [Mastodon] server

https://www.martinmuc.de/blog/crawler-who-follows-whom/Open link View original on piefed.social

Comments5

5 replies

RobotToaster

mander.xyz

The client itself points nowhere either. It names a university and an email address, but no address where you could read up on what this is about.

Shame they apparently didn't do the obvious thing and just ask. I'm guessing it's just some clueless undergrad project.

Snoopy

piefed.social

I added the tag AI Article because comments repported that its style was close to AI

XLE reply

piefed.social

The style looked extremely AI to me: repetitive, "not X but Y", tiny sentences, even "every X a Y" variant.

Tested and appears true.

MrQuallzin reply

pie.eyeofthestorm.place

Doesn't feel AI to me. Original is in German so I can't say if the original feels like AI, perhaps this had some AI translation but it doesn't read like an AI wrote it.

Snoopy reply

piefed.social

I'm quoting @[email protected] comment on the same link on ![email protected]

(We can read it just below on piefed since it merges comment from the same link)

The phrasing and pacing sound repeatedly “but wait there’s more” style that AI seems to favor. Always trying to re-emphasize a point already made to make the reader interpret it a specific way.

Not to mention the em-dashes.

Sometimes good writing sounds like that too, but good writers also know to not use and repeat that same style over every paragraph.

So that what lead me to create and put this tag "AI Article". I admit that's very difficult to seperate fake from the truth and trust any content that have a AI vibe.