Posted by speckx 3 hours ago
I found a place on Mastodon, but the critical mass just isn’t there.
It doesn’t help that many cool looking hobby projects are now just AI slop.
Things are bleak.
It would have been better to categorize the reasons/platforms and then analyze if the farewell posts matched the crimes of the platforms.
I’m confused by that sentence. Giving up on what exactly?
Same with:
> it changed under them
Keep in mind that for the average person (and even the average techy), they will not even see the captcha, because they have enough tracking them across the web that it will 'autoresolve' them as a human. I only see captcha's nowadays when I am working on web scraping automation or browsing from my VPS.
IP+subnet based throttling on the other hand is a perfectly working solution, optionally with a proof-of-work or login requirement for intensive POST requests only. Why is it a problem if only a few requests per day are made per home IP? Just how bad and inefficient is the web server?
Bots are not a second class client. They were here before AI, and they, like AI, work for humans. For the most part, they're not trolling the web autonomously.
[1] Proposed Amendment to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (2026-05-08) - https://www.karlbunch.com/random/website-protection-act/
Even a $5 VM I have has an included quota of at least 1TB egress data per month, and it can handle 9,540,534 requests in a day if not less. A Rust server can handle a lot more. In practice, my egress quota is larger by virtue of having a couple of more nodes.
If you actually cared, you would use something cheaper then AWS, ideally with zstandard compression, and a CPU efficient service that doesn't buckle under a moderate load.