This is why we need social networks where you can choose your moderation independently of your instance. And Mastodon is not that. I’m not sure if Bluesky is.
I don’t think it should be run for free, but I think it’s wrong of them to erase compeition by offering a free service and than suddenly make it not free.
Search engine crawlers generally respect robots.txt, so if you add a robots.txt entry to disallow all crawlers from getting into the maze, effectively only AI crawlers will go there.
That’s not what the distinction is about. The important thing is whether you want to shut them down because of what opinion they’re expressing, or how they’re expressing it.
They do not curate the content that’s posted there. Just because someone wrote something on Facebook does not mean Facebook endorses their opinion, just like sending someone an e-mail does not mean that your e-mail host endorses whatever you sent.
This is why we need social networks where you can choose your moderation independently of your instance. And Mastodon is not that. I’m not sure if Bluesky is.