PieFed Meta

1459 readers

1 users here now

Discuss PieFed project direction, provide feedback, ask questions, suggest improvements, and engage in conversations related to the platform organization, policies, features, and community dynamics.

Wiki

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

rimu@piefed.social

Tired of your instance getting pounded by bots and scrapers? Solved. (infosec.pub)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by rimu@piefed.social to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Instances that are not trying to attract a new audience might want to turn on the new Private Instance setting, which makes everything private. The home page, posts, communities, etc will all require a login to view. Bots and scrapers won't be able to get anything useful from your instance and will stop trying.

Also if a single-user instance is subscribed to mostly NSFW communities, maybe they don't want everyone to be able to see which communities are listed at /communities.

Or it could be used temporarily when a biiig flood of scrapers turn up, then turn it back off when they go away.

Edit: Federation is unaffected by this. For logged-in users everything continues as before.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] notabot@lemm.ee 7 points 3 months ago

Scrapers have been a problem for a lot longer than LLMs have been an issue. Fighting them has always been a pain in the proverbials, but theres been some entertaining work recently on deliberately getting them lost in a maze of made up pages. The problem is that they never stop or go away. They'll just keep trying, and new ones keep springing up.