mindly.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Mindly.Social is an English speaking, friendly Mastodon instance created for people who want to use their brains and their hearts to make social networking more social. 🧠💖

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Should you be wondering why @LWN #LWN is occasionally sluggish... since the new year, the DDOS onslaughts from AI-scraper bots has picked up considerably. Only a small fraction of our traffic is serving actual human readers at this point. At times, some bot decides to hit us from hundreds of IP addresses at once, clogging the works. They don't identify themselves as bots, and robots.txt is the only thing they *don't* read off the site.

This is beyond unsustainable. We are going to have to put time into deploying some sort of active defenses just to keep the site online. I think I'd even rather be writing about accounting systems than dealing with this crap. And it's not just us, of course; this behavior is going to wreck the net even more than it's already wrecked.

Happy new year :)
Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊

@corbet @LWN I have resorted to a wide swath of blocks, in Bytedance's case, blocking entire ASN's (most recently all of Meta). Other wide blocks are on the user agent. Ironically my big load spikes are now from a huge number of servers running ActivityPub whenever one of my sites is linked to!

@corbet @LWN I should mention that the ASN is available through ipinfo.io. If you're working in PHP, @abivia has a library for it.