hear-me.social users:

If you see a “Content” link at the top left of the pages, nope, we aren’t getting hacked, and they are safe to click, but they may cause drowsiness.

We are part of the Cloudflare beta feature test, AI Labyrinth, which is meant to trap and punish AI bots who won’t take “no” for an answer. Many AI bots, pretending to be humans to get around the blocks, are trying to read everything posted here and received here from other servers. And it would suck life out of the server if they were endlessly allowed to read. All social media websites are victims of this.

There are rules to ask them to go away, like the robots.txt file. If you look at https://hear-me.social/robots.txt, you’ll see a rule for all the known AI bots asking them to please go away.

But some AI companies ignore the requests. So Cloudflare has implanted AI-generated articles designed to be of interest to AI bots, but unrelated to a Mastodon server, that are true, but sterile and boring. No human would go more than a few levels deep to read them. But, an AI bot goes nuts reading the information and won’t leave. This is how Cloudflare identifies new AI bots too, as no humans would keep reading. Then Cloudflare starts blocking them.

Although the URLs have hear-me.social as the domain, the articles are read only from Cloudflare servers. The requests never reach our web server. And the bot can read forever, learning nothing, trapped and now harmless.

The links are supposed to be invisible, but if you see the Content link at the top, the browser, for unknown reasons, is not honoring the request to keep the links invisible. I assume Mastodon CSS somehow impacts these elements.

Please ignore the “Content” links until Cloudflare figures it out, but you are welcome to read them to help fall asleep.