Can't l share my piefed posts on other platforms ?
17d 12h ago by feddit.online/u/MastKalandar in piefed_help@piefed.social
Today l had shared a post of mine on xmpp and immediately l was given the feedback that it's protected by an authwall.
Some PieFed servers, like mine (feddit.online), under a massive and constant AI bot scraping campaign, have closed viewing posts to anyone not logged in. I deflect over 700K bot requests/day by doing this along with other measures. I believe piefed.social has done this as well.
Without doing this, the server is unusable. It's a sad reality. Therefore, only people logged into the server can read the posts.
Does this explain it?
I'll try reopening the public viewing of posts when the AI storm stops.
I was surprised when I received such a reply. I always knew that piefed is out and out open source, not like Facebook !!
Billionaires seem not to care that they break public access. It's on them, not on me.
Anyway, I have been spending the past few days analyzing the 700k/day bot traffic coming into feddit.online. Locking down the instance to only logged-in users was necessary to stop the flood from breaking the server.
YOU remember what happened? When the bots disabled the instance, you immediately posted a public complaint about how slow the server became and that you were getting gateway timeouts and couldn't use the server any longer. Do you remember?
I created a number of custom rules in the Cloudflare edge to the point where the server this morning was only receiving about 2,400 of the 700K requests per day from some very sophisticated bots that were getting through my filters by looking and acting totally human, by using Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium, or some such robot tool.
But I just discovered a fundamental flaw in their requests, and I just now added a rule that should block almost all of them.
So, lucky you, I just reopened feddit.online to the public since, by my count, I'm only getting about 10 bot scrapes an hour now hitting the server.
Let me know if the link now works.
It's been a part of my piefed journey. I've been on feddit since the past month, and l've already opened accounts on two more instances and been banned from piefed ca, for reasons l don't know. Probably because l crossposted, which looked like spamming ?
Do you folks want to get a room together?
Meaning ??
Most likely, Cloudflare protection is breaking the share feature. Unfortunately, it's about the only working protection against AI scrapers and DDOS attacks so many instances are unable to disable it.
I get that we need something to combat scraping, especially when the servers start getting hammered, but would it be possible to change it so that anyone can at least see the post that was linked before being forced to log in? Then, if the protections are up, any attempts to browse to anywhere else would greet them with a login screen.
Restrictions were put into place when feddit.online started receiving 700K scraping requests/day, which left nothing except Gateway Timeouts for people using the server. But this restriction has since been removed. AFIK shared links referencing feddit.online should work in XMPP.
It should work now, but I've personally had this same issue happen at other times to me when attempting to share PieFed links for other communities on PieFed.Social.
It may be rare, but it happens often enough that I'm considering including a backup Mastodon/Lemmy link if I ever link to a PieFed post on some other medium. Basically just to ensure that anyone clicking the link at a later date will at least have a backup link to click on in the case that scraping requests have a sudden spike.