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  • jpoesen | 🇪🇺 | 🏳️‍🌈jpoesen@social.jpoesen.com
    Oct 13, 2026, 7:46 AM

    My mastodon instance of 1 user is getting hammered to its limits by AI scrapers.

    Gigabytes of cached data and bandwidth for absolutely nothing.

    Low disk space. Energy spikes. Memory spikes. CPU spikes. Human labor...

    The cost is truly staggering, and this is for a single instance belonging to a single, otherwise insignificant individual.

    Imagine the scale of resource abuse, theft, and climate destruction across the internet.

    Just so people can use a shitty #AI prompt on their shitty site.

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Replies

  • Peter Murraydltj@code4lib.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 12:43 PM

    @jpoesen I work for a company that hosts public-facing library catalogs. There is now an increasing tax just to put something on the web: bandwidth, web application firewalls, engineering time squashing rude scrapers…

    The Internet used to be a nice place to be.

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  • Rob McKennarobmckenna@mastodon.ie
    Oct 13, 2026, 8:05 PM

    @dltj @jpoesen we had to block America from some of our servers a couple of years ago.
    Got lots of emails from nice American scholars/librarians asking for PDFs. Delighted to send them of course.

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  • OddOpinions5failedLyndonLaRouchite@mas.to
    Oct 14, 2026, 3:17 PM

    @dltj @jpoesen

    can someone explain to me, a guy who knows zero, absolute zero, about this, why there aren't simple things that reduce bot traffic ?

    I guess it is a lot harder then I think it is ?

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  • Peter Murraydltj@code4lib.social
    Oct 14, 2026, 4:38 PM

    @failedLyndonLaRouchite @jpoesen The internet is — at its foundational level — open and unauthenticated. Any machine on the network can communicate with any other machine on the network: your device is a machine on the network and the server is a machine on the network. The web — one application on the network — was built the same way...at its core no permission is needed for any machine to request a web page from a server. (1/n)

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  • Peter Murraydltj@code4lib.social
    Oct 14, 2026, 4:42 PM

    @failedLyndonLaRouchite @jpoesen Server operators used to be able to stop bots because they came from predictable blocks of network addresses...akin to stopping people at the border with passports from specific countries. Now, however, there are these things called "residential proxies" that funnel traffic through devices that live in people's homes. Keeping with the country border analogy, it is like using a fake passport to bypass the blocks. (2/n)

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  • Peter Murraydltj@code4lib.social
    Oct 14, 2026, 4:45 PM

    @failedLyndonLaRouchite @jpoesen Residential Proxies are being built into apps that people download to their Smart TVs, smartphones, laptops, etc. The Residential Proxies are then sold as a service to web scrapers. From the owner of the Smart TV's perspective, it might be just one web page request every few hours. From the web server's perspective, it is requests for web pages coming from everywhere...it becomes very hard to filter. (3/3)

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  • mousebotmousebot@todon.nl
    Oct 14, 2026, 11:14 AM

    @jpoesen this makes me wonder if my self-hosted server isnt sick like i thought it was, maybe it is just being bombed

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