It seems like having a website open and available on the internet is getting practically impossible to manage, with bots accounting for more and more traffic. AI has gotten to a point where it can circumvent just about any form of captcha, sooooo, what? Does "the internet just get abandoned in favor of some other, better technology that we hope crops up? Does it fade away? Do the real nerds start their own separate internet, and not let companies in? I donno, food for thought I guess.

  • Tuuktuuk@nord.pubEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    with bots accounting for more and more traffic.

    Can’t you just ignore them?

    You have to pay for the traffic and the bot traffic can easily comprise 99 % of your site’s traffic. It is a huge increase in costs you need to bear. Even if you build a site for 50 people, you may end up paying the costs of a site for 10 000 users.

    There are ways to mitigate this – otherwise hosting an instance of PieFed of Lemmy would be simply impossible, but it does take extra skills, and it’s very bad if you don’t know about this problem beforehand!

    • Libb@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      As a matter of fact the (small French) host I’m using to host my tiny personal blog is giving me a more than generous data allowance as I’ve yet to have any issue. Or maybe it’s just that my blog is so useless that it’s not even deemed worthy of a bot’s attention?

      More seriously, I had not considered that aspect. It sure is not a detail. And that is something I’ll discuss with my host to get his opinion on the question (he must be a lot more informed on that issue). That is another advantage of making business with a local company: there are actual people once can talk to, not AI-powered bots ;)

      Edit: & thx for the explanation.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Is this even for static sites? Geeze, that sounds awful. I’ve been getting really excited about starting up an “indie web” site and enjoying that HTML/CSS digital gardening I was way too ADHD to get in on in the early 00’s…

      • Tuuktuuk@nord.pubEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Probably less relevant for completely static sites. But for example, a PieFed instance can easily get tens of thousands of request from the same bot in one day, requesting different variations of the same thing practically without an end.

        If you’ve got a form that can include text, it will basically try every combination of letters possible for that form. I’ve read enough times about how admins of Fediverse instances are trying to battle those AI scraper bots and what kind of trouble they cause, but I do not personally know enough about the subject to give any advice more useful than what I’ve said. At this point I think you already know about as much about it as I do :D

        But, a completely static page should be safe, I assume?