Post by @agowa338@chaos.social
Running a Mastodon server is becoming increasingly problematic due to GenAI.
There’s multiple different things happening, including but not limited to:
- very aggressive scraping of user content and block evasion, with the resource costs that come with it
- AI agents aggressively trying to register accounts and evade restrictions
- rising cost of RAM - Mastodon is memory hungry, RAM is really expensive now
It’s odd to experience first hand, it’s like being consumed by.. a void.
Don't allow registrations or restrict it to after invites from existing users only.
The scrapers are quite annoying, what kinda helps (in general, not sure about mastodon specifically) is putting dummy links there that the CSS hides and that scrapers will hit. Then once they connect to that endpoint block them as early in nftables as possible. I've a rule that when you connect to specific ports (or violate other conditions) just blackholes the traffic. And excessive caching.
As a general strategy that sounds quite elegant. It would be tempting to feed anything that hooks up to it a stream of pure, random garbage.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @GossiTheDog
Some people try to do that, but I'm not a fan of it, cause that for the most part ends up in being quite annoying when I as an actual user hit it because I use Brave on a macbook most of the time.
Also don't forget that the scrapers use actual browsers and proxy frameworks in apps and TVs these days...
Oh well. It’d be nice if there was something like that where you could tar baby then throw them into a black hole