Will check this out. Thanks!

That’s pretty neat. Thanks!

Will check this out. Thanks!

Thank you for the detailed reply.

keeping on top of this is a full time job!

I guess that’s why I’m interested in a tooling based solution. My selfhosting is small-fry junk, but a lot of others like me are hosting entire fedi communities or larger websites.

In that case I’m interested in tools to automate doing that.

I hadn’t heard of that before, thanks for the link.

I haven’t read through the docs yet… But PoW makes me wonder what the work is and if it’s cryptocurrency related.

Edit: Found it: https://altcha.org/docs/proof-of-work/

In the hackernews comments for that geraspora link people discussed websites shutting down due to hosting costs, which may be attributed in part to the overly aggressive crawling. So maybe it’s just a different form of DDOS than we’re used to.

A commenter in the hackernews post has created this: https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html

I’m interested, but it seems like an easy way for bots to exhaust your own server resources before they give up crawling.

Thank you for the detailed response. It’s disheartening to consider the traffic is coming from ‘real’ browsers/IPs, but that actually makes a lot of sense.

I’m coming at this from the angle of AI bots ingesting a website over and over to obsessively look for new content.

My understanding is there are two reasons to try blocking this: to protect bandwidth from aggressive crawling, or to protect the page contents from AI ingestion. I think the former is doable, and the latter is an unwinnable task. My personal reason is because I’m an AI curmudgeon, I’d rather spend CPU resources blocking bots than serving any content to them.

Thank you for the reply, but at least one commenter claims they’ll impersonate Chrome UAs.

https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

It’s an agree as in I don’t really feel like arguing with another user here. I don’t buy the point about metadata when Signal, a centralized service like Discord (why are we talking about Discord?), may be able to scrape it too. Or the point about anonymity when Signal is far from the right tool for that purpose too, see above “spams your contact list.”

For reliability, I’m not concerned with how much RAM Signal’s servers have. What I should have highlighted is that Signal can nuke your communications on accident / on purpose / under coercion. And it’s proven because they’ve already done it before. Mitigate that by having a backup system set up? That necessarily doubles your surface area for breaks in privacy or whatever a given user is worried about. So starting with Signal in the first place doesn’t make sense to me.

Yes, I agree.

I think that’s fair, maybe I should have said efforts like Matrix.

But I’d also view a singular commercial company’s no-cost product as not being a long term bet on privacy/anonymity.

I don’t trust Signal. Haven’t used it since it went down when people and capitol rioters fled WhatsApp and signed up. My understanding is it’s a brittle centralized system just like WhatsApp.

AND back when I did use it, the app had dark patterns that included spamming all your contacts when you set up the app.

Matrix still needs work, but it is the future in this space.

Quarto is probably the most unique one I’ve seen so far. Thanks for the input.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Thanks for the recommendations!

Neat, thanks!