Now AI blocking will get you more precise control over your website! Now AI crawlers will be allowed to grab your website! But don’t worry! They promised and pinky swore they wouldn’t train any AI on your data. So your data is protected!
Isn’t that great!!?


I would suggest Usenet but my guess is that there are bots there too.
How would one enter Usenet nowadays?
You need to join a newsgroup. Some are open some are private. I would suggest you start with one of the Usenet communities on here. They aren’t super updated but several people have posted info on connecting over the last couple years.
I’m converting the link you gave to Lemmy link, so I can subscribe to it (thank you!!), and leaving it on here for anyone else : )
!usenet@lemmy.dbzer0.com
needs something like treehouse from the novel otherland by tad williams. an anarchist online space, with changing entrypoints that are told only to members of said space… or to stay in reality, something like CACert, where you could get an SSL Certificate for your website for free by talking to people in person and stuff… but nowadays youd make really sure the person you’re inviting isnt some predatory submarine aibro looking for easy content…
I wonder if something like that could be achieved with Meshtastic or HAMNET.
i dont quite get why you need to change the physical layer too but i wont be to critical because meshtastic and hamnet are both pretty cool.
only trouble with hamnet is: afaik in some countries it is illegal to use it to transmit anything encrypted
In this case the Internet would be compromised or otherwise unavailable.
The range is too small with Meshtastic to be useful for connecting a large group. I did some practical range testing with myself and a friend both running a node and me driving around to see what sort of range I could get. We’re 3.5 miles away from each other and it seemed like we’d need a decent amount of repeaters to be able to chat without an internet backbone doing the work.
Maybe in a smaller town with more active neighbors believing in this it would be easier. In a large (flat) metro area, it’s tough to get meaningful coverage without putting in a lot of work building human connections and convincing people to run nodes.
Then I wonder about using HAMNET as the backbone? HAM radio signals can go 100 miles/161 kilometers with the world record being like 4000 miles/6440 kilometers. Obviously you don’t actually need the Meshtastic for HAMNET, but my understanding is that Meshtastic and others like Meshcore are far cheaper and in places like the US you need a license for HAM.
Dude bots have been on Usenet before the WWW existed.
I meant modern LLM bots. But yeah.
I haven’t used Usenet for anything other than file sharing, but I think i will give it a try. I kind of imagine it is like the internet in IRC format. Does anyone have suggestions for interesting newsgroups?