Is the public license meant to be the copyright licensing for your comments?

Yes

Is it meant for crawlers, AI database creators and the like?

Precisely those

Are your comments automatically appended with the link? Or are you mainly copy-pasting it?

A keyboard shortcut

And how does it mesh with the TOS of the lemmy instance you’re on?

I don’t know. That’s for the crawlers, AI database creators, etc. to figure out. If they’re non-commercial, then there shouldn’t be a problem either way. For commercial uses, I hope it makes it impossible, but I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll just tack on the license and hope it might have an effect 🤷 Takes but a keyboard shortcut (an sometimes time to explain it).

Anti Commercial AI thingy

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0