Antenna Abuse and Gemini Abuse (Self-hosting Perils)
SOME months ago Bjorn from Sweden found himself in a bit of a controversy after he had culled certain political commentary from Antenna. Being an apolitical site, we don't want to get to - or even recall - the nature of this censorship and why we deem that wrong (or why the term "censorship" is inadequate; curation is probably the right term).
Today Bjorn writes about "Antenna Abuse". He says:
Antenna allows re-submission of entries with new timestamps, because the author may wish to update a post or remove it. It also allows a feed to contain entries from other top level domains, which one could argue is not a good idea. This is on purpose though I can't recall what my rationale for it was.
Here's a response to it:
It's sad to see, that the trolls found their way to disrupt gemini services. This is why we can't have something good on the internet. Sooner or later those A-holes appear everywhere.
In the more distant past we wrote about abuse in Gemini, notably marketing spam (still very, very rare) and lots and lots of bots that harvest pages without giving much or anything in return. That's more commonly an issue with the Web, but over time it also became a spoken-about issue in Gemini, even if the workload associated with Gemini requests tends to be vastly lower (same for bandwidth payloads).
The issue remains mostly unsolved because there are many bots in Gemini. In the past 3 days we served 310,568 requests (so far today), 52,704 requests (yesterday), and 97,001requests (2 days ago). Those are lots of requests from bots, not people, and when you serve almost 500,000 Gemini pages in 3 days it adds up to moderate strain on the server, even if the pages are "static" and small.
Perhaps all this junk is a sign of Gemini growing up. Or maybe we need to grow up and start blocking undesirable traffic, which fails to justify the workload it induces. Even at 50,000 a day it was becoming enough of a burden to make hosting from home on an SBC somewhat of a stretch.
For those of us not wishing to buy expensive machines for our home (with many CPU cores, RAM etc.) this is a problem. There are many perfectly legitimate reasons to prefer hosting from home (one's humble Gemini capsule) on something like a raspberry Pi, sipping no more than a few volts.
"Bots are most of the WWW's traffic nowadays," an associate remarks, "by far. I guess the same is happening to the remainder of the Internet."
That's not good for the planet. █
