It is so just depressing these days.
Several years ago now I started self-hosting things. Initially the learning process and how to set up everything drove me to eagerly keep learning more and more, and even how to manage keeping everything up and reliable. But then the LLM Scrapers arrived.
I looked at Anubis and decided I didn't want the delay loading for regular viewers, so moved to iocaine which is slightly different in what it does, and that was fine until so many scrapers hit my site that it saturated my upload with generated content feeding the them. So I removed it, watched iftop - for not even very long - over a few evenings and noted a bunch of IP ranges owned by cloud companies and the likes of Meta(Facebook) who's servers have zero reason to hit my sites. Pretty sure no one is sharing links to my blog there. Also Azure, Alibaba... and a bunch of others.
Large cloud provider servers don't need to hit my website.
I do realise that scrapers are also using residential IP ranges via SDK pitched to app developers that add backdoors to utilise the connection for "other things" (I cbf finding a link to put here but you can search for them if you want to get even more depressed about the state of the web), but most of the traffic was from a small number of large cloud allocated /16 IP ranges so I just dropped those in nftables.
I also added nft-blackhole with what seems to be a few not overly zealous IP lists, and it seems to help a bit too.
People who check my photography site would have noticed I haven't updated it in a couple of years now. I have talked about it a few years ago, but it is driving me to consider removing my photography website as it currently is, and just have links to sell physical zines per event.
Zero digital image uploads.
This is more work for me, but it really irks me how entitled the corporate scraping of the web has become just so they can sell back to us a poor imitation of creativity.
I do not want my time spent on something that ends up feeding that machine. Yes I know they are now buying books and destroying them to feed it new data because the online pool it slurps up is now so muddied with LLM slop that it corrupts its own training data, but it seems unlikely they would buy some shitty zine from a local photographer in New Zealand - and I can monitor that.
I watched a video recently where a bunch of devs said they miss the old web, when everyone had their own site. I can't see this being likely again with the amount of "legal" DDOS we have to put up with if we have a website hosted on our home server. You just can't be a casual tech enthusiast and have enough limiting/protection in place these days. A certain amount of knowledge and skill is required, unless you... pay another large corporate to be the CDN in front of it. And the amount of traffic I should be getting means I very much dislike that answer.
Maybe I will enjoy the zine/book-making process if I can streamline the process to a certain point. If I get something useful sorted, I will update here of course.
Sorry.
This is yet another post on the depressing reality of the current times and corporate tech over-reach.
But maybe it will force me to make something that only exists in the physical world instead, so there is that for our silver lining.