this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Fuck AI

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It's impossible, i got this instance to just see lemmy from my own instance, but no, it was slow as hell the whole week, i got new pods, put postgres on a different pod, pictrs on another, etc.

But it was slow as hell. I didn't know what it was until a few hours before now. 500 GETs in a MINUTE by ClaudeBot and GPTBot, wth is this? why? I blocked the user agents, etc, using a blocking extension on NGINX and now it works.

WHY? So google can say that you should eat glass?

Life is now hell, if before at least someone could upload a website, now even that is painfull.

Sorry for the rant.

all 37 comments
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[–] carrylex@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

So I just had a look at your robots.txt:

User-Agent: *
  Disallow: /login
  Disallow: /login_reset
  Disallow: /settings
  Disallow: /create_community
  Disallow: /create_post
  Disallow: /create_private_message
  Disallow: /inbox
  Disallow: /setup
  Disallow: /admin
  Disallow: /password_change
  Disallow: /search/
  Disallow: /modlog
  Crawl-delay: 60

You explicitly allow searching your content by bots... That's likely one of the reasons why you get bot traffic.

[–] plz1@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

AI crawlers ignore robots.txt. The only way to get them to stop is with active counter measures.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 94 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

You can enable Private Instance in your admin settings, this will mean only logged in users can see content. This will prevent AI scrapers from slowing down your instance as all they'll see is an empty homepage, so no DB calls. As long as you're on 0.19.11, federation will still work.

[–] potatoguy@potato-guy.space 44 points 2 days ago

Enabled, thanks for the tip!

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 13 points 2 days ago

Same for Mbin.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 17 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Patience, AI crash bubble burst will be soon.

[–] Zetta@mander.xyz 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It won't crash soon, sorry Charlie. Maybe in like 2 - 5 years, but honestly I don't think there will ever be a "crash", just less ai buzzwords in everything

[–] xep@fedia.io 53 points 2 days ago (1 children)

At some point they're going to try to evade detection to continue scraping the web. The cat and mouse game continues except now the "pirates" are big tech.

[–] brandon@piefed.social 34 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

They already do. ("They" meaning AI generally, I don't know about Claude or ChatGPT's bots specifically). There are a number of tools server admins can use to help deal with this.

See also:

[–] lurch@sh.itjust.works 13 points 2 days ago

these solutions have the side effect of making the bots stay on your site longer and generate more traffic. it's not for everyone.

https://zadzmo.org/ is dead already and arstechnica is writing about them so...

[–] parpol@programming.dev 38 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Use Anubis. That's pretty much the only thing you can do against bots that they have no way of circumventing.

[–] potatoguy@potato-guy.space 17 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, going to install it this week, but the nginx extension seemed to solve the issue.

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 5 points 2 days ago

Which extention are you using if I may ask?

[–] termaxima@programming.dev 24 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Anubis + Nepenthes is the answer.

[–] Finch9678@europe.pub 14 points 2 days ago

Article for whoever was unaware like me.

[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

You can either use Cloudflare(proprietary) or anubis (Foss)

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl -1 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Because it harms marginalized folks' ability to access content while also letting evil corp (and their fascist government) view (and modify) all encrypted communication with your site and its users.

It's bad.

[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

For clarity, you are referring to Cloudflare and not anaubis?

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I am referring to cf, but I would expect anaubis would be the same if it provides DoS fronting

[–] monogram@feddit.nl 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Anubis work in a very different way than cloudflare

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 1 points 1 day ago

How well does it work in tor browser in strict mode?

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 9 points 2 days ago

Cloudflare has pretty good protection against this, but I totally understand not wanting to use Cloudflare

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 8 points 2 days ago

Haha, just wait when you get ddosed by anonymous user agents. I have been there.

I'm talking 40k requests per 5 seconds.

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Just cache. Read only traffic should add negligible load to your server. Or you're doing something horribly wrong

[–] potatoguy@potato-guy.space 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

They are 1 cpu and 1 gb of ram pods, postgres goes to 100% cpu on 500 requests per minute, after i put the NGINX extension, it reduced to at max 10%. On weaker servers, these bots make hell on earth, not the config.

[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If it's hitting postgres it's not hitting the cache. Do you have a caching reverse proxy in front of your web application?

[–] potatoguy@potato-guy.space 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I don't have a cache, but the problem is solved now, i can browse lemmy haha.

[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The nginx instance you have in front of your app can perform caching and avoid hitting your app. The advantage is that it will improve performance even against the most stealthy of bots, including those that don't even exist yet. The disadvantage is that the AI scum get what they want.

[–] potatoguy@potato-guy.space 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Oh, cool. I'm going to look at it!

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 2 points 2 days ago

If that doesn't work for you, also look at varnish and squid.

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 1 points 2 days ago

Load should be near zero for reads.