Effective immediately
Effective immediately, RedLib is now also protected with a JS captcha just like nitter to prevent further abuse and crawling.
Why?
Because reddit itself has crawling protections in place to prevent/throttle access of other crawlers. RedLib bypasses those protections
(or at least gives crawlers a proxied connection to reddit) and this has been abused by, most likely, "AI" companies to facilitate their training.
I cannot tell for sure how much of this is just normal crawling and how much is "AI", since this server doesn't log requests (unless I'm
troubleshooting something).
The point is, sometime during yesterday 2025-05-11 reddit (fuck u/spez) blocked my ip from accessing their site, even for authenticated users and apps.
This server is a voluntary effort to give something back to the community. I cannot indefinetly invest resources into it and fighting crawlers is in
itself already a cat and mouse game (I'm the cat :)), fighting it without JS is like...a mostly blind cat with 3 legs and a mouse on steroids.
The current firewall already blocks over 41.557.760 IPv4 addresses from ASNs known to be problematic.
Unfortunately, this is what had to be done to stop or at least tune down the abuse. It is unfortunate that some users will have a degraded, less private
experience by not being able to browse the instance anymore without JS enabled at least for the first visit untill the captcha completes but I can't
serve bots proxied content indefinetly. I really hope I won't have to do this for other services as well.
At least it's not cloudflare...yet...