1d ago

Tired of your instance getting pounded by bots and scrapers? Solved.

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.

7 comments

Fucking AI has destroyed the internet. And for what? All to grift a bunch of investors.
- 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.

This sounds fantastic, PieFed is growing so much so quickly!:-)

I really need to make a piefed instance one of these days. Just not so sure I have the hosting experience necessary.

Nice!
Does it still federate with that enabled? Last I checked, enabling private instance in Lemmy also disabled federation.
- This was changed in Lemmy 0.19.11, now you can have private instance with federation enabled to prevent crawling.
- It still federates, yes.

7 comments