I think this would be the only way. It would be interesting to knowing how much traffic or requests this instance gets to see if its a real problem. Server admins could implement stricter rate limiting for non-members if it becomes an issue. They could even likely implement something that could allow them to sort out which of their members are making the most requests to have some visibility. I don’t believe this is something that is possible today from within platform anyway.

There’s really two issues here:

1. If users are ok and even aware that their public conversations are certainly going to be picked up and used for future models
2. Are the lemmy instance admins ok with potentially half of their traffic going to bots that are hoarding and scrapping the data causing additional load on the servers.

Maybe @[email protected] would be open to share some insights regarding to the amount of requests is received per month and how much resources its taking

I think in one of the next releases of lemmy users will have the option to block the instances they don’t want to interact with. Given that option comes soon I feel that this will be less of a SJW issue and instead more of a user preference.