AI-Training Data Scrapers are constantly attacking the feddit.online instance, in the last 24 hours about 70% of all traffic here was a bot of nefarious intent.
This is a continuation of the problems experienced last weekend which were temporarily snubbed by CloudFlare filtering them out, but they always return eventually.
This is the reason many users have been complaining about poor uptime/stability.
Hopefully the AI-friendly instances allow the feeding and end up poisoning the datasets lol
If I had the time, knowledge, & hardware, I’d be setting up honeypots to accomplish exactly that, rotating through new names every so often as they figured out the truth of the current one.
I remember hearing about one type of AI defence where the page has some invisible redirects at the top which human users won’t see but bots will and that takes the crawlers into an infinite maze of constantly randomly generated redirects.
What you described is that but more nefarious because it would take the AI owners longer to notice they’re just wasting compute time lol.