piefed
What worked at 100 users broke at 5,000
Recent events have made me realise something.
In the early days, when PieFed was tiny (it’s still tiny I guess) me being really engaged with the community was a huge strength. I knew immediately what was going on and could release a fix/change really fast and people loved that. In contrast it made the other projects and their devs seem slow and distant.
It worked great. For quite a while.
But now PieFed has thousands of users and there are haters and there are bugs and there are feature requests, etc etc and now what used to be a strength has become a danger and a weakness. Me jumping onto every issue and responding every time someone @ rimu’s me drags me into stuff, destroys my focus and leaves me on the verge of burnout. If people can troll me into behaving erratically (they can!) then it stalls my work and when I behave badly it makes the whole project look bad.
Now I understand why larger projects’ devs keep some distance. It’s the only way to keep working while the storm rages outside.
It looks like I’m going to have to put in some insulating layers between me and the wider fediverse. Defined communication channels for feature requests, places to report bugs, delegate to others some/more of the community management, put together a FAQ and more docs, and so on.
There will have to be some debates, issues and conspiracy theories that are left alone and not debunked by me personally. Internet chatter is just not something I can be putting as much time into as I used to. Realistically that point was passed months ago but I lacked the experience needed to spot it at the time.
Although unpleasant for me personally this growth is a good problem for PieFed to have. It just means my focus and strategy needs to change, to protect my attention & energy and serve the community as well as I can over the long term.
#fediverse #FOSS #piefed
AI scrapers have been hammering fediverse servers for years with things getting especially intense lately. Fediverse developers have been slow to respond with solutions so desperate instance admins have been bolting on Anubis which is fragile and really hard to configure in a way that doesn’t break federation, mobile clients or web UI access. Anubis forces browsers to run some CPU-heavy javascript for a few seconds, increasing the cost to scrapers hopefully to the point where they go elsewhere instead.
PieFed now includes that functionality as a core feature, not a separate container, proxy or process that needs to be set up. Just set the ANOOBIS environment variable and you’re done. Yes, that spelling is intentional.
The amount of work a client needs to do can be tuned with the ANOOBIS_DIFFICULTY_DESKTOP and ANOOBIS_DIFFICULTY_MOBILE environment variables - the defaults are quite weak.
Early results are very promising and a 50% CPU and network reduction on the server is commonly seen. Clients that are not logged in will see a brief loading screen, once every 1000 days, before being taken to the post they were trying to view.
I’m sure this isn’t the end of this war but I’ve been enjoying a respite from it for the last week, long may it continue.
(Image supplied by @dosdude@retrofed.com, thank you!)
PieFed 1.7.9 includes Anubis-like scraper blocking
