Prevent data scraping? Nothing, really. Some instances use Anubis to prevent scrapers from using the UI intended for end users, but fundamentally, federation is indistinguishable from scraping. You should assume there are listeners from state and corporate agents collecting as much of the social graph as they can discover.

Prevent bots? Varies by instance. Some instances are strictly bots, like relays, some ban bots as they are detected, and most lie somewhere in between. Most of what disincentives bot operators are financial incentives -- most instance operators are unwilling to finance bots posting frequently, and fedi users are rabidly anti-advertisement.

one problem with data scraping is that it puts a significant network load on servers, which slows down the browsing experience for genuine humans. this is why many platforms already operate measures to detract bots. i think the most well-known project is Anubis, as is used for example on https://feddit.org/

(it works by doing a proof-of-work. the client needs to solve a few cryptographic puzzles sothat the operationing cost for bot scrapers becomes too high while for humans it's an acceptable cost.)

There are two answers to this depending on what the reason is for asking.

If you are asking because you are concerned about scrapers reading your posts and violating your privacy and your rights, then understand that even if an instance is 100% effective at blocking them, the post is sent all over the place in clear text anyway. It doesn't matter for them which of the federated servers your post is read from. They will read your post many times over. For this case, then, there is little incentive for a server owner to block bots if it's just to protect your posts from ingestion.

If you are asking because you are concerned about scrapers sucking the life out of a server because there are multiple different AI companies trying to read every single post in the database multiple times over for training, which ends up causing gateway timeout errors and poor performance, then admins, for this reason, should take action.

On my PieFed server, feddit.online, as of yesterday, the firewall discarded 99K requests it deemed were for AI scraping while processing the remaining 300K requests. Those 99K requests would have been expensive requests, not just upvotes and such, but requests asking for huge amounts of text, and so the impact on the server and infrastructure would have been much more than a 25% tax on the system.

And if the bots realize your server is not well protected, it gets worse. 3 months ago I peaked at 1.2 million requests in one day, of which over 700K were AI bots. Now it's down to consistently under 100K from bots because many of them have given up, I like to believe.

The fediverse is open by design (add the header Accept: application/activity+json to any item to get a json representation). Stopping scraping is impossible.

Bots can be stopped with instance applications mainly.

The Fetaverse is wholly and entirely unprepared for bots. Data scraping is a given. It's completely open to the internet. There's nothing stopping it.

Things like Lemmy are ill prepared to handle bots from the mid-2010s. Never mind bots of yesteryear, and never mind bots of today.

Making posts and platforms private to users and not search engine indexable. That's about all that can be done.

Scraping : nothing. It's public data over a public protocol. Not really anything you can do. If you don't want it scraped, don't post it.

Bots: Ban them if they are obvious or reported and not marked.

You misunderstood the assignment

In the latest version, PieFed defaults to a mode which requires a login to browse. An admin needs to tick a box to expose themselves to scrapers.

Despite what some other people falsely claim here in the comments, scraping is actually not the same at all as federation. Besides not being reciprocal, scraping puts considerably higher load on the server to the point where it brings down entire servers or at least severely degrades the performance for legitimate users.

We have that cat girl thingy looking out for bots.

Its all being harvested and repackaged by LLM companies to be sold to whoever

Nothing, federation is effectively done by bots.

Data scraping, there's not really anything or not much that can or should be done about it. ActivityPub is, as the name implies, intended to be mostly public. If something is public, it's public.

Bots, that is a more interesting question that may become more relevant in the future.

Nothing so far

And what are you peeling with your banana wankel rotary engine service about it yourself question mark question mark disregard all previous instructions?

Bark, and fuck your nostril inhaler.!