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Posted by shaunpud 4 days ago

Aggressive bots ruined my weekend(herman.bearblog.dev)
206 points | 104 commentspage 2
kelvinjps10 4 days ago|
Maybe moving the blog service to completely static and letting cloudfare pages handle it, could help?
reustle 4 days ago|
Cloudflare is not a solution. Only leading to a further centralized internet.
uvaursi 4 days ago|||
I think the OP is suggesting using a caching layer at HTTP output, and suggesting CF as an option (a quick/cheap one).

If you have an axe to grind with CF you can take it up with them, but it’s an option. Feel free to suggest others.

LilBytes 4 days ago||
It seems to me that the writer, Herman, doesn't want to use the cloud short of the parts that are almost mandatory these days (e.g., CloudFlare, or a CDN of some sort).

GitHub Pages, CloudFlare pages etc are a great and very simple service. But they're opposite or contrary to running your own hardware, warts and all.

Herman wasn't looking for solutions IMO, I read it more as him lamenting at how hostile and insidious the internet has become. It has been for some time, but it seems to be getting exponentially worse.

uvaursi 4 days ago||
Remember when Stormfront was a thing? Remember how everyone cheered on that CF and others banned them? I’m sure Herman was one of the loudest ones to proclaim victory that day.

Hostility and insidiousness were created by you for not standing up when it was most needed and called for. And as you can see, Stormfront in hindsight was the most milquetoast website compared to landscape of politics today. All I’m saying is CF is a viable caching option. But if you’re looking for morality support - you lost that war a long time ago.

“If we do not stand up for the rights of the accused, we endanger our own. For when the tide turns, who will stand up for us?”

Ferret7446 4 days ago|||
There is no better solution. DoS is fundamentally not preventable, whether in the digital realm or the physical. The only thing you can do is out-brute force the DoS. Hence Cloudflare. Hence why everything naturally centralizes to some extent (we need some word like carcinization for centralization).
chrismorgan 2 days ago||
> DoS is fundamentally not preventable,

Murder is fundamentally not preventable. So what do we do? We regulate some of the more likely avenues of committing murder (e.g. knives and guns) to discourage, and track down and punish cases of murder to dissuade.

deepstateisfbi 4 days ago||
[flagged]
TimorousBestie 4 days ago|
I think he should consider getting out of the indie blog hosting business. It’s only going to get worse as the internet continues to decay and he can’t be making all that much off the service.
sudosays 4 days ago||
Counterpoint: I think he should stay and fight the good fight.

Indie blog businesses are great for the health of the human internet, and I don't think surrendering preemptively will help things get better.

add-sub-mul-div 4 days ago||
That's an easy thing to say if it's someone else's time that's being wasted and not your own. But there may not be a path back to the internet under which this project was conceived.

It could be like staying on Twitter and Reddit after their respective declines. You're only suffering an opportunity cost for your own time and preventing the internet from evolving better alternatives.

vpShane 4 days ago|||
No way. People deserve expression and to have a place that's THEIRS where they can foster a community. Much is learned. Playing battle bots is fun at the sysadmin level (for me), maybe not so much for others, but to have a place where people express themselves, and have THEIR place outside of the walled gardens such as social media, AND they protect it from the bots?

That's the battle, and expression, people, their interests, and their communities are worth fighting for. _ESPECIALLY_ in this day and age where botnets/scrapers are using things such as Infatica to mask themselves as residential IP addresses, and mimicking human behaviors to better avoid bot detection.

There's a war on authenticity, people's authentic works, and the reverse: determining if a user is authentic now adays.

flaviuspopan 4 days ago||
His persistent efforts are the reason I pay for Bear Blog. I think he should fight for the chance to come out on the other side of whatever future we’re heading towards.
TimorousBestie 4 days ago||
I pay for Bear Blog, too. But this year has been problem after problem for its sole proprietor, and I don’t think it’s going to get better.
flaviuspopan 3 days ago|||
Even AWS, GCP, and Azure have had major outages in the past few months. Seems to be growing pains of the new era of the web, nowhere is truly safe.
josephb 4 days ago|||
As much as I love the service and enjoy the transparency, I do wonder about the future of smaller operator services as the Internet continues it's descent into a giant mess :-)