https://awakari.com/#about is a site that SELLS information about Fediverse instances and users. They created an instance that has to be banned now: activitypub.awakari.com
In this instance there is a bot that will follow as much accounts it can in order to gather data to sell. Also block awakari.com, so all the new domains will be blocked.

UPDATE: they opened a new instance with a new bot

activitypub.awakari.app (the instance)
@Awakari@activitypub.awakari.app

UPDATE 2: They are now using fake names that don't include Awakari but the profile is the same. The new domain is Indy.rest and the profile is @indy.rest@indy.rest

#fediblock

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@vndmtrx @cadusilva @eltonfc @rafaelcaricio @ErikUden @stux @PaulaToThePeople

@Ursalzona@ursal.zone hey @saabria

Sorry about dis, but kidna urgent

@Ursalzona cc @m @admin @gabboman @shiri

And now *someone* from social (probably the owner of awakari) reported my toot - not sure if they even know how Mastodon works.

Go for it, champ. Report the admin for the admin.

Update: Andrei Kurilov (@ akurilov @ mastodon.social - he is the genius behind the scrapping. Block him too, I blocked him from the entire instance).

@burnoutqueen @Ursalzona Our instance already tries to disallow this tool from scraping data from the instance. We're trying to stay on top of it!

For future reference, can you tag @mods so that the whole team gets notifications? Both for team transparency, and for folks to be able to act more quickly than me!

@burnoutqueen @Ursalzona No worries! It's more just for the sake of making it easier for us to support the instance

@Ursalzona nuked

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@Ursalzona @crashdoom Maybe? Seeing others tagging instance admins

@exec @Ursalzona @crashdoom

There's that one @awakari@activitypub.awakari.com and also @awakari_search@mastodon.social , btw.

I looked into it earlier. From what I gather, the way this works is that, instead of traditional search like google which searches for content that has already been created, the user of that tool can subscribe to a topic and get notified whenever any post on multiple websites is made on that topic. Basically cross-website any-topic RSS.

From what I understand, the business part of it (Customer Targetting) comes from the tool being able to read certain well-established JSON schemas used for product promotion. So a company store implements the schema, and tools like it notify their users about the product.

The thing is sorta interesting in principle but the website doing vague corporate speak + following users quietly without explanation + the fact it considers non-restricted follows "explicit consent" is very shitty indeed.

@herzenschein @exec @Ursalzona @crashdoom

Let me tap the sign for the people that didn't learn anything about ethics:
"SILENCE DOES NOT EQUAL CONSENT!"

@jerry given your diligence, I'm guessing these leaky freeloaders sphincters are already nuked?

@johntimaeus yeah. Most of us admins have been playing whack-a-mole with them but unless they’ve set up something new recently they’re blocked here. @herzenschein @exec @Ursalzona @crashdoom