Incoherent rant.

I’ve, once again, noticed Amazon and Anthropic absolutely hammering my Lemmy instance to the point of the lemmy-ui container crashing. Multiple IPs all over the US.

So I’ve decided to do some restructuring of how I run things. Ditched Fedora on my VPS in favour of Alpine, just to start with a clean slate. And started looking into different options on how to combat things better.

Behold, Anubis.

“Weighs the soul of incoming HTTP requests to stop AI crawlers”

From how I understand it, it works like a reverse proxy per each service. It took me a while to actually understand how it’s supposed to integrate, but once I figured it out all bot activity instantly stopped. Not a single one got through yet.

My setup is basically just a home server -> tailscale tunnel (not funnel) -> VPS -> caddy reverse proxy, now with anubis integrated.

I’m not really sure why I’m posting this, but I hope at least one other goober trying to find a possible solution to these things finds this post.

Anubis Github, Anubis Website

Edit: Further elaboration for those who care, since I realized that might be important.

• You don’t have to use caddy/nginx/whatever as your reverse proxy in the first place, it’s just how my setup works.
• My Anubis sits between my local server and inside Caddy reverse proxy docker compose stack. So when a request is made, Caddy redirects to Anubis from its Caddyfile and Anubis decides whether or not to forward the request to the service or stop it in its tracks.
• There are some minor issues, like it requiring javascript enabled, which might get a bit annoying for NoScript/Librewolf/whatever users, but considering most crawlbots don’t do js at all, I believe this is a great tradeoff.
• The most confusing part were the docs and understanding what it’s supposed to do in the first place.
• There’s an option to apply your own rules via json/yaml, but I haven’t figured out how to do that properly in docker yet. As in, there’s a main configuration file you can override, but there’s apparently also a way to add additional bots to block in separate files in a subdirectory. I’m sure I’ll figure that out eventually.

Edit 2 for those who care: Well crap, turns out lemmy-ui crashing wasn’t due to crawlbots, but something else entirely.
I’ve just spent maybe 14 hours troubleshooting this thing, since after a couple of minutes of running, lemmy-ui container healthcheck would show “unhealthy” and my instance couldn’t be accessed from anywhere (lemmy-ui, photon, jerboa, probably the api as well).
After some digging, I’ve disabled anubis to check if that had anything to do with it, it didn’t. But, I’ve also noticed my host ulimit -n was set to like 1000… (I’ve been on the same install for years and swear an update must have changed it)
After changing ulimit -n (nofile) and shm_size to 2G in docker compose, it hasn’t crashed yet. fingerscrossed
Boss, I’m tired and I want to get off Mr. Bones’ wild ride.
I’m very sorry for not being able to reply to you all, but it’s been hectic.

Cheers and I really hope someone finds this as useful as I did.