Thank you for the link. Good read

Exactly. It's called proof-of-work and was originally invented to reduce spam emails but was later used by Bitcoin to control its growth speed

Someone making an argument like that clearly does not understand the situation. Just 4 years ago, a robots.txt was enough to keep most bots away, and hosting personal git on the web required very little resources. With AI companies actively profiting off stealing everything, a robots.txt doesn't mean anything. Now, even a relatively small git web host takes an insane amount of resources. I'd know - I host a Forgejo instance. Caching doesn't matter, because diffs berween two random commits are likely unique. Ratelimiting doesn't matter, they will use different IP (ranges) and user agents. It would also heavily impact actual users "because the site is busy".

A proof-of-work solution like Anubis is the best we have currently. The least possible impact to end users, while keeping most (if not all) AI scrapers off the site.

"Yes", for any bits the user sees. The frontend UI can be behind Anubis without issues. The API, including both user and federation, cannot. We expect "bots" to use an API, so you can't put human verification in front of it. These "bots* also include applications that aren't aware of Anubis, or unable to pass it, like all third party Lemmy apps.

That does stop almost all generic AI scraping, though it does not prevent targeted abuse.

Yes.

Source: I use it on my instance and federation works fine

As long as its not configured improperly. When forgejo devs added it it broke downloading images with Kubernetes for a moment. Basically would need to make sure user agent header for federation is allowed.

Yeah, it's already deployed on slrpnk.net. I see it momentarily every time I load the site.

TL;DR: You should have both due to the explicit breaking of the robots.txt contract by AI companies.

AI generally doesn't obey robots.txt. That file is just notifying scrapers what they shouldn't scrape, but relies on good faith of the scrapers. Many AI companies have explicitly chosen not no to comply with robots.txt, thus breaking the contract, so this is a system that causes those scrapers that are not willing to comply to get stuck in a black hole of junk and waste their time. This is a countermeasure, but not a solution. It's just way less complex than other options that just block these connections, but then make you get pounded with retries. This way the scraper bot gets stuck for a while and doesn't waste as many of your resources blocking them over and over again.

The difference is:

• robots.txt is a promise without a door
• Anubis is a physical closed door, that opens up after some time

I mean, you could have read the article before asking, it's literally in there...

Well, now that y'all put it that way, I think it was pretty naive from me to think that these companies, whose business model is basically theft, would honour a lousy robots.txt file...

The problem is Ai doesn't follow robots.txt,so Cloudflare are Anubis developed a solution.

Robots.txt expects that the client is respecting the rules, for instance, marking that they are a scraper.

AI scrapers don't respect this trust, and thus robots.txt is meaningless.

the scrapers ignore robots.txt. It doesn't really ban them - it just asks them not to access things, but they are programmed by assholes.