Elena Rossini ⁂Mar 17

Yesterday my VPS set off a warning, as it was hit by a huge spike in incoming traffic, peaking at 55GB at 2:15pm and lasting for an hour.

Upon investigating, it turns out it was my PeerTube instance that was targeted.

Where did the traffic come from?

meta-externalagent (aka Meta's web crawler which is used to grab content to train its AI system).

I feel a little bit violated thinking my Fediverse promo video was grabbed by it, sigh.

#AIcritic #NoAI

Show threadMitex LeoMar 17
@_elena I was forced to take down my SearXNG instance because of these stupid bots.
Show threadAndy Piper
@ml @_elena I have mine behind Aurelia so only I can use my own searXNG
Mar 17 at 9:44amWeb
Show threadBen HardillMar 17

@andypiper @ml @_elena

I got hit by this as well last week, 30% of all hits from the bot in the last 14 days.

I've not had any response from the email address they published on their bot page, so all those requests are getting 301'd to 100GiB gzip bomb for now

https://blog.hardill.me.uk/2026/03/12/wtf-facebook-doing/

Show threadJohn Faithfull 🌍πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ΊπŸ΄σ §σ ’σ ³σ £σ ΄σ ΏπŸ§‘βœŠπŸ»βœŠπŸΏMar 17

@ben @andypiper @ml @_elena
> a blanket 301 redirect to a 100GiB gzip bomb

Nice πŸ‘Œ πŸ‘ πŸ‘

Show threadKATastrophEMar 17
@andypiper @ml @_elena my searxng has been fine so far (at least to my knowledge), but thanks for the heads up, i should really put it behind my sso!
Show threadMitex LeoMar 17
@kate @andypiper @_elena I was running a public instance. Also didn't use Cloudflare as requested by some users.
Show threadKATastrophEMar 17
@ml @andypiper @_elena mine is public and i also don't use cloudflare (just my own vps with wireguard for tunneling the traffic)