you can try to visit the instance domain directly and check the instance sidebar there.
if it's lemmy it will also show the admins in the sidebar, if it's other software it can be harder to find. you can then look up the admin users from LW and send them a pm if they don't have any other contact info on their instance.
there are quite a few ways to use more granular targeting. for example, we have specific url patterns that get challenged if certain headers have certain values and are missing others, while other urls won't get challenged.
it would be trivial for them to not DDoS and yet they keep doing it.
if they were calling Lemmy APIs directly they would significantly reduce the load they bring to our service. if they were speaking ActivityPub they could even get the content delivered to their front door directly via federation.
they don't care that they DDoS websites. they don't care about optimizing for how certain types of websites are built, to reduce impact on third parties. the only language they speak is DDoS.
they intentionally spoof legitimate browser user agents and cycle through massive ranges of IP addresses. they have enormous pools of IPv4 addresses available that allow them to only use each IP for a couple of requests before cycling to the next one, which is yet another way they evade detection, as they are bypassing any rate limits we have configured that way.
we're currently challenging visitors who aren't logged in regardless of the browser due to extremely aggressive LLM scrapers. as long as you're staying logged in you won't get challenged.
you being able to create this post here indicates that you wouldn't be blocked from commenting on lemmy.world, so this is not an issue related to this website.
doesn't really look much different between the two instances. the theme differences are minor. the current default theme on piefed.world is even a bit more compact than the quokk.au default theme.
there are also user settings for more compact post listings, e.g. the variant with smaller thumbnails:
and after writing all this i realized you were referring to the bottom navigation. we updated several piefed versions in the last few days, if this is still the case for you i recommend raising this as a bug directly at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues
in the past couple of days it seems like LLM crawlers have been ramping up again, with totally normal traffic patterns like these
we're currently looking into trying to identify them better without having to serve everyone with a captcha or something like anubis to access the site.
they don't seem to be moderating at all, nor interacting with anything on the fediverse other than spamming to their own communities, likely automated. we will defed from them soon if i don't receive a response to my pm. i'm aware of at least one other instance admin unsuccessfully attempting to reach out to them already due to lack of moderation.