Post by @petko@petko.me
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.
@GossiTheDog what blocking is in place that is being successfully evaided?
edit: i already know anubis is useless
@petko @GossiTheDog Literally everything, because these companies have the money to spend on cat & mouse games & we have none. All moderators can do is pile hacks on top of their networking setups to block protocol abuse & manually sort through registration applications to kick out bots.
@jackemled, thank you but I was looking for concrete examples... That are not anubis since I already know it doesn't work.
"Anubis doesn't work" seems a bit of a quick and concrete judgement. I find it or something like it is a good first step and cuts out the low-effort bots at least unless it really is that bypassable by literally everything.
If this is our future, every account should be an instance. Bloat? Sure, but bot farms wouldn't be able to pull it off at scale for every single bot. For us individually? Ez pz.
https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/creepy-crawlies
@Walruths at one point I thought that deploying proof of work at scale (i.e. *everyone* deploying it) would be able to offset the economy of scraping. Now I no longer believe that. There is no world where a data center full of stolen/upcycled phones solving proof of work will give up sooner than your users.
That is awfully dire.
BUT, I'm still leaving it on.
If they're gonna eat me, I'm at least going to stab them until they get to my arm.
@petko
> a data center full of stolen/upcycled phones solving proof of work
Mind blown.
In my country, some large electronics retailers have recently started mobile phone buy-back campaigns. They evaluate your old phone and give you a voucher with a value based on the device's state and capabilities. They pay more than they used to.
Silly me, I thought it was for the environment.
