Mastodawn

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

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RichBartlett

@_elena not sure if you've seen this https://bluetoot.hardill.me.uk/@ben/116243885816341998, I particularly like his response of using a 301 redirect to a massive file!

Ben Hardill (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] 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/

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