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FSE meets the FBI

ve for you a bizarre tale of scrapers, feds, data poisoning, Torswats, and everyone's favorite fedi instance. It veers technical, because I suspect it will be of interest to other people running servers with UGC (i.e., every fedi instance), and also because the mechanics of how I figured out what I figured out might be useful.

It turns out that a lot of them have a habit of just dumping illegal stuff everywhere and coming back in a week to see which accounts have been banned and which places have admins that are asleep (an approach that basically leaves no doubt that they are knowingly parasitic), then telling their friends", so you have to stay on top of it and get rid of them early, or they bring more. FSE being fedi's equivalent of a dive bar, I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it (though it turns out that instance-blocking is ham-fisted and just blocking a handful of accounts solves the problem), but I would prefer if they did not lie about their reasons or about me personally. nginx, lighttpd, Apache httpd, and almost all of the other webservers that are popular to set in front of fedi for load-balancing or caching or filtering or rate-limiting, they all have a some directives that allow you to control the format of the logfiles, log arbitrary headers, timing information.

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