Post #374788

2026-01-07 16:02 UTC

Just FYI: this is part of the damage being done by extractive AI companies. Their scraper bots routinely DDOS us, and they multiply to take up as much bandwidth as is available. We are having to put a huge percentage of our developers’ time into just keeping the site alive rather than building its future. They are actively destroying everything worthwhile about the internet. @hello https://hcommons.social/@hello/115854618561953712

Replies (6)

@bekopharm@indieweb.social 2026-01-08 09:28

@kfitz@hcommons.social getting hammered here for months. Old backyard hosted forum on a landline where people talked a little about AI for _a game_ *YEARS AGO*. Sent HTTP 503 for ~4 weeks. Now banning everything that does not accept a cookie. Sucks, I know, but works for most REAL people. They do not care. It is even getting worse. All requests are from unique IPs so the usual throttling does not work. I don't know what to do any more. Very close to giving up and shutting down. Internet seems to be over.

Open ##1138895
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl 2026-01-08 10:58

@kfitz @hello I’m employing Bad Bot blocker IP blocklists for that purpose https://github.com/mitchellkrogza/nginx-ultimate-bad-bot-blocker/tree/master That’s quick and easy to deploy, but I also block aggressive bots using Suricata IDS with Wazuh on all servers - much recommended too.

Open ##1138899
@jimgroom@social.ds106.us 2026-01-07 16:39

@kfitz @hello I hear you on this. It's been a total nightmare for Reclaim as well, what's worse is that blocking them is a joke, no one honors it. We had a site go from 1-2 million hits on avg per month to 7-8 million hits on avg basically overnight and it's all bots. Makes running a site with significant content and history exponentially more resource intensive.

Open ##1614035
@benjaoming@social.data.coop 2026-01-07 21:11

RE: https://mastodon.world/@lastfmstatus/115855534233229757 @kfitz @hello looks very similar to last.fm now

Open ##1614042
@steko@scholar.social 2026-01-07 21:20

@kfitz @hello sadly, this comes from the top of the pyramid (as bad as the metaphor is). KC is based on Wordpress, and Wordpress leadership now actively promote AI as a foundational tool for the future of the web bla bla bla 😰 https://wordpress.org/news/2025/12/sotw-2025/

Open ##1614043
@josh@hactivedirectory.com 2026-01-08 04:48

@kfitz @CosmicTraveler @hello HTTP 429 is your salvation here.

Open ##1614044