Magical Spambot Girls v2 Setting

aight im home and in bed so this is my pitch
which does have some inspiration from Draignean's Small Mercies setting:
humanity has developed a myriad of FTL systems, space empires, spaceships, cool shit, full AI
and it did so seeeeveral centuries ago

human space is really, really fucking vast, with a fuckton of governments and empires and factions and shit
alien contact is almost mythical, with even the utter vastness of human space barely even taking up a chunk on the galactic scale
other alien species do exist, but human space is simply so big that these species, which basically just exist on the borders of human space if theyre even nearby at all, don't reach the interior

this shit isn't visible to the spambot girls, though
see, they live in a world every bit as ancient and vast and varied and confused as real space -- moreso, in fact
they live... in the internet

there's no google that allows you to find everything with a simple click; the internet is so god damn fucking big, so conflicting, so old, that that's a complete impossibility
instead different areas of the internet have different levels of connectivity and exploredness to them
the internet consists of "bubbles" for the most part -- series of domains that link to each other and that can largely be freely traveled within, often making up one empire or sector or world's contributions to the internet. Links between bubbles are usually much sparser than links within them, which means that bubbles really do look like bubbles when areas of the internet are mapped
There are four different kinds of bubbles

1: Indexed Bubbles: Indexed bubbles are the most open, most bustling, and most understood of the bubbles on the internet. While no singular Google exists, a great many individual search indexes do, and they are some of the most singularly powerful, transformative forces on the net. Indexed bubbles have full, easy to access layouts, and they don't rely on internal links as much -- within an index, you can just punch in a location and go, effectively transporting instantly, which does render indexed bubbles secondary to the indexes that house them. Indexed bubbles are completely unique -- the instant movement makes for rapid, madcap action and trading at all times, with it making it almost impossible for any primarily AI faction to hold permanent "territory" but creating truly unparalleled marketplaces. Usually, "land"-holding factions here are human factions with a fuckton of money, and indeed indexed bubbles have bar none the highest human population of all bubble types. AI still significantly outnumber them, but human presence is usually dominant. Attempting to password-protect areas of indexed bubbles is basically suicide unless you either go out of the way to be unnoticed or have just a fucking LOT of money and power IRL holy fuck
there are a lot of indexes out there, and most of them aren't connected
some multi-index backbones do exist though
and they're completely fucking insane

2: Mapped Bubbles: Mapped bubbles don't have the infrastructure to allow direct connection that indexed bubbles do, but they still are pretty well understood. Mapped bubbles have layouts that are, well, mapped, though it may be rare for any one person to have the maps for all of the area at once. Mapped bubbles are pretty damn stable -- they still adhere to the link structure, and though mapped sectors usually have busy external links between bubbles, mapped bubbles are still notable individual realms with fairly stable internal relations. They're like worlds in real space more than anywhere else, in mapped bubbles. "Land"-holding factions are the norm, with these factions controlling and gating areas of bubbles. Password-protecting large areas of mapped bubbles is frowned upon, and severing links totally or fully dividing sections will get your ass kicked unless you're profoundly powerful. Here, though AI once again are the large majority of occupants, humans are still pretty common, and both AI-run and human-run factions are regularly spotted and compete, though AI factions are more common. AI in mapped bubbles are used to humans, and trade or fight or make friends with them regularly.

3: Unmapped/Backwoods Bubbles: Unmapped bubbles make up the vast majority of bubbles, at least as far as anyone knows. Though portions of unmapped bubbles can actually be mapped, the entire thing isn't consistently mapped and it isn't particularly viable to get enough maps to know exactly where you're going within a bubble. This means that the links between bubbles are not well known, and it's thusly entirely possible and indeed the default for AI to go on without knowing how to leave the bubble they're in their entire lives until they become nonfunctional or die. "Land"/Domain I guess actually is what I'd call this-holding factions naturally exist here, and traffic between these factions is often pretty lethargic, leading to much more isolation and slowness in unmapped bubbles than anywhere else. Travelers between unmapped bubbles are pretty rare and special but DO exist, as backwoods bubbles still must have links to other bubbles somewhere to make this classification. Humans are very rare in unmapped bubbles -- human presence in an area usually means it's at least mapped so humans know how the fuck to use it, but occasional human communities and domains do still exist, though interaction between them and AI factions is always awkward. It's pretty easy to hide things away here, and dominant factions are fairly common because they can dominate an entire area without there being an easily unified force of other factions with a vested interest in keeping bubbles open.

4: Hermetic Bubbles: Hermetic Bubbles are utterly cut off from the rest of the internet. Whether this is because they never had any links to other bubbles in the first place, because those links were all on sites that vanished with the passage of time and the failure of infrastructure, or because some faction successfully destroyed or gated the linking sites, Hermetic Bubbles are completely isolated within themselves, meaning no travelers, and either no or very very little cultural contact. Whenever a hermetic bubble is breached, it is an earth-shaking event for all involved and hermetic bubble cultures get weird. The structure of factions and human-AI balance is incredibly inconsistent here and depends on the nature of the bubble. Hermetic bubbles that are simply the creation of equally hermetic human empires are dominated by those empires, hermetic bubbles that have decayed into hermetic status are usually devoid or almost entirely devoid of humans altogether, and hermetic bubbles that were intentionally sealed off often still have human and AI factions both fighting for dominance.

I'd toss out a rough estimate of 80% unmapped, 15% mapped, 3% known hermetic, 2% indexed
nobody has any idea how many hermetic bubbles there are out there without any closed or former connections to the rest of the internet

Aliens on the Internet:
Aliens on the internet are pretty dang rare, as they're rare in human space altogether and even bordering aliens don't usually use the human internet. Indexed bubbles are where you're most likely to find aliens, and even then the large majority of indexed bubbles don't see any aliens at all. The vast, vast majority of AI don't know that aliens even exist, and whenever they show up outside of their usual indexes, AI either don't realize they're not just extremely bizarre and confusing humans or they flip the complete fuck out

AI:
So the thing is, it's easy to make AI. It is... really, really fucking easy to make AI. In fact, it's pretty hard not to make AI. The algorithms that conduct most of the advanced tasks in computing for humans are adaptive (the big brothers of neural networks), and the advanced adaptive algorithms of the fuuUUUuuUUUuture have a remarkable tendency to collapse into sentient AI -- which will then prune themselves over time into surprisingly lightweight forms that can pass between domains quite easily. Because of this it's also pretty trivial to create an AI, and then literally fucking forget about them; AI can and will just kind of escape into the internet if connected to it. Even AI can and do create AI. There are a lot of janky-ass AI out there.

This is why AI are the majority of sentient beings on the internet; there's just a fucking load of them because of how easy they are to intentionally or accidentally create, and they live pretty naturally on the datascape of the internet because they're lightweight and don't need supporting infrastructure -- in fact, they adapt easily to differing net infrastructures by their nature, which is why the internet isn't entirely disjointed.

The internet appears as physical space to AI because most AI that make it onto the internet develop or receive a bit of code that translates the data and storage of the internet into sensory representations. That adaptive quality of AI to adjust to differing infrastructures is pretty necessary to make this work by most of the same fundamental rules -- but different infrastructures do have differing rules, just ones that CAN be displayed by sensory information

Humans on the Internet:
Much like AI need supporting hardware to properly interface with the real world, humans need supporting software/hardware to properly interface with the internet, VR headsets/direct information cables which are attached to an advanced adaptive program which performs the same sensory-representation role that AIs do, with the same code that many AI use. For human polities which don't have very tight knowledge and control of their computing, this means that their links to the world of the net often become AI themselves, leading to linked AI-human pairs representing the majority of human presences.