busybee fluffy rambles Notes

As I’ve been saying for years, the problem with Twitter isn’t that it’s centralized, but that it’s Twitter.

This post goes into some great details about what that means.

I wrote a bit about this recently, which importantly also includes some information about what you as a website operator can do about it, namely how to look up the CIDR of the abusers' netblocks and add denial rules into ufw if that’s what you use. I should probably expand it to cover other situations as well since not everyone can run ufw.

No I will not be running it

It does absolutely nothing to slow crawlers down (it’s not like they’re going to wait for a page to finish loading before they move on to the next one, crawlers are super optimized to just constantly grab as much bandwidth as possible in parallel), there’s already so much AI slop on the web that it’s not going to contribute meaningfully to model collapse, and all you’re doing by running it is wasting even more resources. Giving the LLM crawlers more content to slurp up just gives them more reasons to waste even more resources, and only continues the death spiral of making the Internet an even worse place.

This isn’t like interfering with scammer call centers through scambaiting or the like. Computers have no problem with having their time wasted.

And meanwhile it does nothing to actually solve the problem.

If you are actively hiring for positions in a company that is friendly to transgender people, in a country that is safe for transgender people, and you are willing to sponsor visas for people seeking to emigrate for these positions, I would like to hear from you.

Ben is good people and an excellent ally. If you know of anyone matching the description above, please get in touch with him.

I like when things keep it simple, and I’m always elated to see webmention.js being used in the wild.