miaApr 20, 2025
glad we're at the stage of our cyberpunk hell-timeline that we have corporate botnets DDoSing the free software communities that they rely on, leading to an arms race between the biggest companies in the world and a virtual anime person developing a proof-of-work proxy with an anime girl mascot that's now deployed by the united nations
Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken

I guess you have all heard about the growing problem of AI companies trying to aggressively collect whatever data they can get their hands on to train their models. This has caused an explosive surge in web crawlers relentlessly hitting servers big and small. But who runs these crawlers? Turns out — it could be you!

Jan Wildeboer's Blog
Show threadmia
ive seen a few people complain that this will increase power usage and therefore cause global warming or whatever. not to worry - the fediverse is already much more inefficient than any competent pow checker. in the process of replying to me complaining about it, you've used more power than you did the one time you sat through the challenge page. sorrgy
Apr 27, 2025 at 2:44pmWeb
Show threadprincess pancake ​Apr 27, 2025
@mia I mean, multiply by the number of page visitors and number of visits and stuff
Show threadmiaApr 27, 2025
@natty well
multiply by the number of replies i got on my psot
Show threadmiaApr 27, 2025
@natty post
Show threadtempestApr 27, 2025

@mia as if proof of work didn't originate as a spam prevention feature before it got rolled into cryptocurrency

the key difference being that there's not some runaway incentive to "out compete" other participants in the system, so spam prevention won't see the work required escalate forever in a ridiculous speculative arms race

Show threadOliver GeerApr 27, 2025

@mia I guess people hear "proof-of-work" and think of Bitcoin mining. I guess Bitcoin uses a lot more energy than the Fediverse or Anubis, comparing typical usage by the same number of people, right? Definitely with its current usage in scams and memecoins more than ordinary usage of decentralised finance, the power:utility ratio would be higher IMO.

The ideal situation would be that the crawlers respected robots.txt and this wasn't needed. But of course...