The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers
The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers
Anubis, which block AI scrapers from scraping websites to death, has been downloaded almost 200,000 times.
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Ooh can this work with Lemmy without affecting federation?
Yes.
Source: I use it on my instance and federation works fine
Thanks. Anything special configuring it?
I keep my server config in a public git repo, but I don't think you have to do anything really special to make it work with lemmy. Since I use Traefik I followed the guide for setting up Anubis with Traefik.
I don't expect to run into issues as Anubis specifically looks for user-agent strings that appear like human users (i.e. they contain the word "Mozilla" as most graphical web browsers do) any request clearly coming from a bot that identifies itself is left alone, and lemmy identifies itself as "Lemmy/{version} +{hostname}" in requests.
"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.
The API, including both user and federation, cannot.
This is theoretically an issue however in practice Anubis only weighs requests that appear to come from a browser: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/design/how-anubis-works
I just tested my instance with Jerboa and it seems to work just fine.
Yeah, it's already deployed on slrpnk.net. I see it momentarily every time I load the site.
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.
To be honest, I need to ask my admin about that!
We don't use anubis but we use iocaine (?), see /0 for the announcement post