I think this form the article is telling:

> The Register asked Schubert about this in early January. "Funnily enough, a few days after the post went viral, all crawling stopped," he responded at the time. "Not just on the Diaspora wiki, but on my entire infrastructure. I'm not entirely sure why, but here we are."

So the owners of those crawlers certainly have the ability to stop the traffic, they're just choosing not too...until publicity makes their actions risky.

They take the data and deal with the consequences later because there's none so far. I hope data poisoning see more traction as a possible countermeasure.