Archaeme@takeshitakenji From what I've been hearing, it's not necessarily mastodon instances, but rather scraper bots that provide Mastodon-related services like instance lists and public timelines.
@takeshitakenji It just seems like rate-limiting is a thing those guys can't seem to fully grasp for some reason.
Conrad Pankoff@archaeme on the other side of things though, Mastodon and GNU Social both seem to be very fragile if you knock on the wrong doors a little too hard. Both clients and servers need to improve - but each is really only responsible for their own problems. Clients' incentive to improve is "not getting banned" - servers' incentive is "don't crash when there's a broken client".