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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Does this mean that some of the more unhinged users might actually be chat bots? Or are they just scraping our comments reddit style?
Scraping by the look of it.
Also if you have ever spun up a lemmy or piefed instance, you will quickly see these bots pop up. They don't respect robots.txt AT ALL. I estimate 95% of the traffic I get on ly tiny little server is all AI crawlers.
A good way to hurt them is to either use cloudflares service or create a page that has a link....to another page that gets generated.....to another page. And each time, it slows down. No human would ever click the link, but bots ALWAYS do. Its so funny to see how many are out there in the quagmire of links on my little python script.
Does it generate any form of visuals? Like could you post a screenshot of something that shows how far a bot has traveled? I've heard about these traps but I'm curious about what you're describing looks like
I just have a id. 1/2.... A href id if that makes sense.
So it's the logs that see the number of iterations. Thousands on a couple of ips. Script kiddies.
Honestly I didn't think the black hole would work that well. But it reduces the actual traffic by a huge factor.
Anubis?
Another good one.
I assume scraping at this point. There's likely a few hobby ones now, but if Lemmy becomes popular then there will be lots of bots for sure.
I guess they mostly scrape it. To waste resources posting here they have to find a way to make money in doing so. They put bots posting on facebook because they think it increases user engagement. They dont want to increase engagement on lemmy (not that it would work...).
There are definitely bots here, but they're scraping too.