poVoq

Obviously I don't think you need Anubis for a static site. And if that is what your admin experience is limited too, than you have a strong case of dunning krueger.

No one is disputing that in theory (!) Anubis offers very little protection against an adversary that specifically tries to circumvent it, but we are dealing with an elephant in the porcelain shop kind of situation. The AI companies simply don't care if they kill off small independently hosted web-applications with their scraping and Anubis is the mouse that is currently sufficient to make them back off.

And no, forced site reloads are extremely disruptive for web-applications and often force a lot of extra load for re-authentication etc. It is not as easy as you make it sound.

You clearly don't know what you are talking about.

Yeah, German Universities have special direct internet access via the "Hochschulnetz". We had some pretty fancy 5ghz directional wifi connections over several km connecting to it, but it was fairly slow (shared 10 mbit), which made that impractical for most private internet use.

It would already help if apartment buildings had an internal network with a single connection point, but I can tell you as someone who worked on this as a volunteer for student dormitories back in the day that ISPs are extremely hostile to the idea.

If you check for GPU (not generally a bad idea) you will have the same people that currently complain about JS, complain about this breaking with their anti-fingerprinting browser addons.

But no, you can't spoof PoW obviously, that's the entire point of it. If you do the calculation in Javascript or not doesn't really matter for it to work.

In the current shape Anubis has zero impact on usability for 99% of the site visitors, not so with meta refresh.

And how do you actually check for working JS in a way that can't be easily spoofed? Hint: PoW is a good way to do that.

Meta refresh is a downgrade in usability for everyone but a tiny minority that has disabled JS.

You are arguing a strawman. Anubis works because because most AI scrapers (currently) don't want to spend extra on running headless chromium, and because it slightly incentivises AI scrapers to correctly identify themselves as such.

Most of the AI scraping is frankly just shoddy code written by careless people that don't want to ddos the independent web, but can't be bothered to actually fix that on their side.

AI scraping is a massive issue for specific types of websites, such as git forges, wikis and to a lesser extend Lemmy etc, that rely on complex database operations that can not be easily cached. Unless you massively overprovision your infrastructure these web-applications come to a grinding halt by constantly maxing out the available CPU power.

The vast majority of the critical commenters here seem to talk from a point of total ignorance about this, or assume operators of such web applications have time for hyperviligance to constantly monitor and manually block AI scrapers (that do their best to circumvent more basic blocks). The realistic options for such operators are right now: Anubis (or similar), Cloudflare or shutting down their servers. Of these Anubis is clearly the least bad option.

I kinda sucks how AI scrapers make websites inaccessible to everyone 🙄

That blog post is fundamentally misunderstanding what Anubis actually does.

@povoq@slrpnk.net mentioned the possibility of a solarpunk piefed instance in the past, but it’s yet to become something concrete.

We don't plan to setup a separate Piefed instance, but we want to migrate our main Lemmy instance to Piefed sometimes early next year, but there are still some unknowns if the migration will be feasible or not.