Mastodawn

This is a pretty solid #fuckyou to #meta. I noticed that my mastodon instance was servicing a lot more traffic than normal, so I looked in to it and it was all from the meta crawler. Thousands of requests to the sign_up endpoint and over 5GB of data transfered. Fuck you, assholes. Every other crawler used 100MB or less. It's not that I even mind crawlers too much as long as they're responsible. This is insane.
#mastodon #fediverse #selfhosting #programming #spam #bots #fuckai #ai #fuckmeta

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alex_r 1d ago

@ragingHungryPanda whoa - what do you think the reason is for the outlier?

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Michael DiLeo 1d ago

@alex_rosenfeld I'm not too sure, but I've heard of others having issues with meta's crawlers. It looks like it was spaming `/auth/sign_up?accept=<some GUID>` with random values multiple times per second for the past week. It wasn't even scraping content, just doing the same signup with a new guid.

I can only speculate if it's dumb code or a dumb AI or if something was trying to find a guid (that doesn't exist) to get signed up, but finding a GUID would happen by the heat death of the universe