(Don’t ask how)

I imagine you just couldn’t find the words at the time but I would have, with relative accuracy, summed this up as:

“Each server on that web can communicate with every other server on that web by using ‘secret’ information to determine a path to get there”

Each federated service is on its own web

I know you said simplification to the point of inaccuracy, but while I’m being pedantic:

“Each federated service is on its own web, but imagine they overlap with each other in such a way to bleed into a single web”

The point was “don’t add another bot into the pile of millions of bots that hit people’s servers every day unless you’re gonna be polite about it”

You’re definitely right that I went a bit extreme with what I used as a reason against it, but I feel like the point still stands about “just ask before you slam people’s servers with yet another bot on the pile of millions of bots hitting their F2B system”

In this scenario, I have multiple servers which are networked together and federated via ActivityPub but the server cluster itself is air gapped.

As to your questions about feasibility and purposes, I will admit I both didn’t think about that, and should have been more clear that this air gapped federated instance was theoretical lol

Going by your example

Air gapping my service is the agreement you’re talking about in this analogy, but otherwise I do actually agree with you. There is a lot of implied consent, but I think we have a near miss misunderstanding on one part.

In this scenario (analogies are nice but let’s get to reality) crawling the website to check the MAU, as harmless as it is, is still adding load to the server. A tiny amount, sure, but if you’re going to increase my workload by even 1% I wanna know beforehand. Thus, I put things on my website that say “don’t increase my workload” like robots.txt and whatnot.

Other people aren’t this concerned with their workload, in which case it might be fine to go with implied consent. However, it’s always best to follow the best practices and just make sure with the owner of a server that it’s okay to do anything to their server IMO

if you run a federated services… Is that enough to assume you consent

If she says yes to the marriage that doesn’t mean she permanently says yes to sex. I can run a fully air gapped “federated” instance if I want to