Dave

No it’s not, it was more of a tangential comment.

I think this is the photography site he’s talking about.

He mentioned “so many scrapers hit my site that it saturated my upload with generated content feeding the them.” which seemed unusual to me. I’m not sure why such a site would have a public upload. It doesn’t feel like a site that would have a technical challenge with the scrapers, but I also get the impression the main issue is the thought of hosting all his photos just for AI scrapers to train their image generation models.

Lemmy is particularly susceptible. Hosting a static site with a limited number of pages is fine. But Lemmy needs to check all posts, find the votes, sort them, and compile the page. It does that for practically every page load, and so loading a page once is quite “expensive”.

Then add on to that the almost unlimited pages of content for bots to crawl through, bots just get caught endlessly scraping pages. Even powerful servers struggle, which is why most Lemmy instances have implemented some sort of protection against bots.