Tired of your instance getting pounded by bots and scrapers? Solved. (media.piefed.social)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by rimu@piefed.social to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social

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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.

Edit: Federation is unaffected by this. For logged-in users everything continues as before.

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[-] Ulrich@feddit.org 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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

[-] notabot@lemm.ee 6 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] admiralpatrick@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago

Nice!

Does it still federate with that enabled? Last I checked, enabling private instance in Lemmy also disabled federation.

[-] rimu@piefed.social 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

It still federates, yes.

[-] abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us 3 points 5 days ago

I had coded up something similar (but less configurable) on my own single-user pyfedi instance. But this is really nice. In particular it's surprising that we can now do something that lemmy can't (yet).

I wonder what's next on the radar. Implementing https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5578 maybe? (Thought I wouldn't be surprised if this was also already implemented...)

[-] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 5 days ago

Yes, that's done. When you block an instance it is the equivalent of a user-level defederation.

[-] rosahaj 3 points 5 days ago

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

[-] rosahaj 3 points 5 days ago

Or in other words, I keep seeing you come out with fantastic features, and can hardly contain myself from biting the bullet and going all in, excellent work. :)

[-] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 5 days ago

Good to hear that, cheers 👍

[-] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 5 days ago

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

[-] mesamunefire@piefed.social 2 points 5 days ago

Nice this is great! Now openai can stop endlessly pulling from my server.

this post was submitted on 09 May 2025

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