1080p buffered generously but it worked :) The sweet spot was having it transcode to 720p (yay hardware acceleration). I wasn’t sharing it with anyone at the time, so it was just me watching at work on one phone while using my second phone at home for internet.

Just about anything as long as you don’t need to serve it to hundreds of people simultaneously. Hell, I once hosted Jellyfin over a 3G hotpot and it managed.

Pretty much any web-based app will work fine. Streaming servers (Emby, Plex, Jellyfin, etc) work fine for a few simultaneous people as long as you’re not trying to push 4K or something. 1080p can work fine at 4 Mbps or less (transcoding is your friend here). Chat servers (Matrix, XMPP, etc) are also a good candidate.

I hosted everything I wanted with 30 Mbps upload before I got symmetric fiber.

Not healthcare (thank gods!) but equally esoteric as far as acquiring line-of-business software goes.

Doing so would effectively doxx the org I work for and, by association, me, so no name and shaming this time. They’re not a big player you’d recognize, anyway, and mostly deal with specialty/niche software.

Maybe I should flesh it out into an actual guide. The Nepenthes docs are “meh” at best and completely gloss over integrating it into your stack.

You’ll also need to give it corpus text to generate slop from. I used transcripts from 4 or 5 weird episodes of Voyager (let’s be honest: shit got weird on Voyager lol), mixed with some Jack Handy quotes and a few transcripts of Married…with Children episodes.

https://content.dubvee.org/ is where that bot traffic lands up if you want to see what I’m feeding them.

Thanks!

Mostly there’s three steps involved:

1. Setup Nepenthes to receive the traffic
2. Perform bot detection on inbound requests (I use a regex list and one is provided below)
3. Configure traffic rules in your load balancer / reverse proxy to send the detected bot traffic to Nepenthes instead of the actual backend for the service(s) you run.

Here’s a rough guide I commented a while back: https://dubvee.org/comment/5198738

Here’s the post link at lemmy.world which should have that comment visible: https://lemmy.world/post/40374746

You’ll have to resolve my comment link on your instance since my instance is set to private now, but in case that doesn’t work, here’s the text of it:

So, I set this up recently and agree with all of your points about the actual integration being glossed over.

I already had bot detection setup in my Nginx config, so adding Nepenthes was just changing the behavior of that. Previously, I had just returned either 404 or 444 to those requests but now it redirects them to Nepenthes.

Rather than trying to do rewrites and pretend the Nepenthes content is under my app’s URL namespace, I just do a redirect which the bot crawlers tend to follow just fine.

There’s several parts to this to keep my config sane. Each of those are in include files.

• An include file that looks at the user agent, compares it to a list of bot UA regexes, and sets a variable to either 0 or 1. By itself, that include file doesn’t do anything more than set that variable. This allows me to have it as a global config without having it apply to every virtual host.

• An include file that performs the action if a variable is set to true. This has to be included in the server portion of each virtual host where I want the bot traffic to go to Nepenthes. If this isn’t included in a virtual host’s server block, then bot traffic is allowed.

• A virtual host where the Nepenthes content is presented. I run a subdomain (content.mydomain.xyz). You could also do this as a path off of your protected domain, but this works for me and keeps my already complex config from getting any worse. Plus, it was easier to integrate into my existing bot config. Had I not already had that, I would have run it off of a path (and may go back and do that when I have time to mess with it again).

The map-bot-user-agents.conf is included in the http section of Nginx and applies to all virtual hosts. You can either include this in the main nginx.conf or at the top (above the server section) in your individual virtual host config file(s).

The deny-disallowed.conf is included individually in each virtual hosts’s server section. Even though the bot detection is global, if the virtual host’s server section does not include the action file, then nothing is done.

Files

# Map bot user agents
## Sets the $ua_disallowed variable to 0 or 1 depending on the user agent. Non-bot UAs are 0, bots are 1

map $http_user_agent $ua_disallowed {
    default 		0;
    "~PerplexityBot"	1;
    "~PetalBot"		1;
    "~applebot"		1;
    "~compatible; zot"	1;
    "~Meta"		1;
    "~SurdotlyBot"	1;
    "~zgrab"		1;
    "~OAI-SearchBot"	1;
    "~Protopage"	1;
    "~Google-Test"	1;
    "~BacklinksExtendedBot" 1;
    "~microsoft-for-startups" 1;
    "~CCBot"		1;
    "~ClaudeBot"	1;
    "~VelenPublicWebCrawler"	1;
    "~WellKnownBot"	1;
    #"~python-requests"	1;
    "~bitdiscovery"	1;
    "~bingbot"		1;
    "~SemrushBot" 	1;
    "~Bytespider" 	1;
    "~AhrefsBot" 	1;
    "~AwarioBot"	1;
#    "~Poduptime" 	1;
    "~GPTBot" 		1;
    "~DotBot"	 	1;
    "~ImagesiftBot"	1;
    "~Amazonbot"	1;
    "~GuzzleHttp" 	1;
    "~DataForSeoBot" 	1;
    "~StractBot"	1;
    "~Googlebot"	1;
    "~Barkrowler"	1;
    "~SeznamBot"	1;
    "~FriendlyCrawler"	1;
    "~facebookexternalhit" 1;
    "~*(?i)(80legs|360Spider|Aboundex|Abonti|Acunetix|^AIBOT|^Alexibot|Alligator|AllSubmitter|Apexoo|^asterias|^attach|^BackDoorBot|^BackStreet|^BackWeb|Badass|Bandit|Baid|Baiduspider|^BatchFTP|^Bigfoot|^Black.Hole|^BlackWidow|BlackWidow|^BlowFish|Blow|^BotALot|Buddy|^BuiltBotTough|
^Bullseye|^BunnySlippers|BBBike|^Cegbfeieh|^CheeseBot|^CherryPicker|^ChinaClaw|^Cogentbot|CPython|Collector|cognitiveseo|Copier|^CopyRightCheck|^cosmos|^Crescent|CSHttp|^Custo|^Demon|^Devil|^DISCo|^DIIbot|discobot|^DittoSpyder|Download.Demon|Download.Devil|Download.Wonder|^dragonfl
y|^Drip|^eCatch|^EasyDL|^ebingbong|^EirGrabber|^EmailCollector|^EmailSiphon|^EmailWolf|^EroCrawler|^Exabot|^Express|Extractor|^EyeNetIE|FHscan|^FHscan|^flunky|^Foobot|^FrontPage|GalaxyBot|^gotit|Grabber|^GrabNet|^Grafula|^Harvest|^HEADMasterSEO|^hloader|^HMView|^HTTrack|httrack|HTT
rack|htmlparser|^humanlinks|^IlseBot|Image.Stripper|Image.Sucker|imagefetch|^InfoNaviRobot|^InfoTekies|^Intelliseek|^InterGET|^Iria|^Jakarta|^JennyBot|^JetCar|JikeSpider|^JOC|^JustView|^Jyxobot|^Kenjin.Spider|^Keyword.Density|libwww|^larbin|LeechFTP|LeechGet|^LexiBot|^lftp|^libWeb|
^likse|^LinkextractorPro|^LinkScan|^LNSpiderguy|^LinkWalker|msnbot|MSIECrawler|MJ12bot|MegaIndex|^Magnet|^Mag-Net|^MarkWatch|Mass.Downloader|masscan|^Mata.Hari|^Memo|^MIIxpc|^NAMEPROTECT|^Navroad|^NearSite|^NetAnts|^Netcraft|^NetMechanic|^NetSpider|^NetZIP|^NextGenSearchBot|^NICErs
PRO|^niki-bot|^NimbleCrawler|^Nimbostratus-Bot|^Ninja|^Nmap|nmap|^NPbot|Offline.Explorer|Offline.Navigator|OpenLinkProfiler|^Octopus|^Openfind|^OutfoxBot|Pixray|probethenet|proximic|^PageGrabber|^pavuk|^pcBrowser|^Pockey|^ProPowerBot|^ProWebWalker|^psbot|^Pump|python-requests\/|^Qu
eryN.Metasearch|^RealDownload|Reaper|^Reaper|^Ripper|Ripper|Recorder|^ReGet|^RepoMonkey|^RMA|scanbot|SEOkicks-Robot|seoscanners|^Stripper|^Sucker|Siphon|Siteimprove|^SiteSnagger|SiteSucker|^SlySearch|^SmartDownload|^Snake|^Snapbot|^Snoopy|Sosospider|^sogou|spbot|^SpaceBison|^spanne
r|^SpankBot|Spinn4r|^Sqworm|Sqworm|Stripper|Sucker|^SuperBot|SuperHTTP|^SuperHTTP|^Surfbot|^suzuran|^Szukacz|^tAkeOut|^Teleport|^Telesoft|^TurnitinBot|^The.Intraformant|^TheNomad|^TightTwatBot|^Titan|^True_Robot|^turingos|^TurnitinBot|^URLy.Warning|^Vacuum|^VCI|VidibleScraper|^Void
EYE|^WebAuto|^WebBandit|^WebCopier|^WebEnhancer|^WebFetch|^Web.Image.Collector|^WebLeacher|^WebmasterWorldForumBot|WebPix|^WebReaper|^WebSauger|Website.eXtractor|^Webster|WebShag|^WebStripper|WebSucker|^WebWhacker|^WebZIP|Whack|Whacker|^Widow|Widow|WinHTTrack|^WISENutbot|WWWOFFLE|^
WWWOFFLE|^WWW-Collector-E|^Xaldon|^Xenu|^Zade|^Zeus|ZmEu|^Zyborg|SemrushBot|^WebFuck|^MJ12bot|^majestic12|^WallpapersHD)" 1;

}

# Deny disallowed user agents
if ($ua_disallowed) { 
    # This redirects them to the Nepenthes domain. So far, pretty much all the bot crawlers have been happy to accept the redirect and crawl the tarpit continuously 
	return 301 https://content.mydomain.xyz/;
}

I was blocking them but decided to shunt their traffic to Nepenthes instead. There’s usually 3-4 different bots thrashing around in there at any given time.

If you have the resources, I highly recommend it.

“Install and run our uninstall utility” is also equally frustrating and common lol.

Yep, been there. Thankfully that particular boondoggle fizzled out at the “Expect me to fix everything for them (despite not being involve in any of the above)” step because I refused. Normally me refusing wouldn’t fly, but vendor’s instructions required configuring Remote Desktop Services in a way that clearly and blatantly violated Microsoft’s licensing terms and non-IT group did not want to pay for the requisite number of license seats and vendor insisted you did not need RDS licenses for this scenario (spoiler: you totally do).

I think the non-IT group still has a contract with [shitty robotic process automation vendor], though, but we just washed our hands of it and the non-IT group uses their cloud version.

I’ve debated reporting that company to Microsoft for license violations because I just hate them (I have their deployment instructions and emails as proof) but I’ve just stopped caring and am not quite petty enough to do so lol.

Most of the requirements are going to be for the database, and that depends on:

1. How many active users you expect
2. How many large rooms you or your users join

I left many of the large Matrix spaces I was in, and mine is now mostly just 1:1 chats or a group chat with a handful of friends. Given that low-usage case, I can run my server on a Pi 3 with 4 GB of RAM quite comfortably. I don’t do that in practice, but I do have that setup as a backup server - it periodically syncs the database from my main server - and works fine. The bottleneck there, really, is the SD card storage since I didn’t want an external SSD hanging off of it.

Even when I was active in several large Matrix spaces/rooms, a USFF Optiplex with a quad core i5, 8 GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD was more than enough to run it comfortably alongside some other services like LibreTranslate.

I disabled local thumbnail generation almost a year ago, and things mostly work the same.

Instead of a local thumbnail image URL for things like news articles that get posted, it will be the direct URL value from the og:image metadata from the source. Usually those load fine, but sometimes they don’t due to CORS settings on their side. Probably only 1-2% of posts have issues, though.

For image posts that come in via federation, (memes, pics, etc), the thumbnail image URL is the same as the post URL. In other words, you’re loading the full res version in the feed. Since I use a web client that has “card view”, this actually works out better, visually. YMMV whether that’s a drawback for you.

The only pitfall is that you will lose thumbnails for image posts if an instance goes offline or shuts down.

I’m sure that does increase load slightly on other instances, but no more than if the remote instance had image proxying turned on. And the full-res version always has to load from the remote instance (even if you have local thumbnail generation enabled). All in all, I’d say the additional load is acceptable given the benefits of disabling local thumbnail generation.

To mitigate that, in my case anyway, I have my own image proxy/cache in place. My default UI is Tesseract and it’s configured with the image proxy/cache on by default… (I think I saw that Photon is also working on something similar). In this configuration, the first person to scroll past a remote image fetches it directly (via the proxy/cache) and it’s now available locally in the cache for everyone else (unless they’re connecting with a different client that doesn’t use Tesseract’s proxy). Granted, I shutdown my instance last year and it’s just now a private testbed for development, but when I did have daily active users (plural), the proxy cache helped.

Now the only images my instance stores are ones that are uploaded locally.

Why did I disable local thumbnails?

• I closed up my instance and didn’t want potentially problematic thumbnails being generated while I wasn’t actively modding it
• Generated thumbnails go in, but they don’t go out. There’s no way to clean them up later other than the ephemerally generated ones (if someone requests a version in a custom size, for example)
• Increasing storage costs. Like, I’d be scrolling the feed and see some of the dumbest shitposts while constantly thinking “Ugh, this is costing me money to store a copy”.

Other Republican politicians, including former President Donald Trump, also criticized the show as inappropriate.

1. If only
2. USA Today needs to either use a better model or just get rid of the AI-generated key point summary.

Orphan Black: Live

Somewhere between 35 and 39, but yeah. Not sure how old she was when we got her (fully grown), but I was 5 or 6 then and was 40 when she passed. Have to assume it was just old age Always called her “Horse, of Course” lol

Sorry to hear. How old was he? My family had a horse since I was like 5 or 6. She hated being ridden but would follow you around like a dog. She died year-before-last at, I believe, age 39.

I prefer sans-serif fonts visually but prefer serif for readability. So I use Atkinson Hyperlegible which is a mish-mash of both.

And bonus meme:

Oh, you’re right. It does work after updating. I was on 2025.12.08 which was the latest the last time I messed with it around that same time and saw that the SABR bug had been open since March of 2025. Still open so that was what I had been watching.

The 2026.02.04 build worked fine.

Still gonna keep my PT instance lol.

Huh. I’m on the latest release and every video I download fails with the SABR notice and link to the issue for it. Maybe it’s regional?

I used to just yt-dlp any YT video links people share, but that doesn’t work anymore and no ETA on a fix.

My new favorite thing is my PeerTube instance. yt-dlp is basically broken for almost all YT videos now since it doesn’t yet support SABR, and most videos are forcing that now. Peertube’s importer seems to have no problem with it, so that’s where I am.

Someone shares a YT link? Copy, paste into Peertube, wait like 30 seconds for the transcode, and watch. No BS. And if I want to watch it later? Well, there it already is.

Edit: It appears the wonderful people maintaining yt-dlp have fixed that since I last tried back in December.

FYI: I moved the allow rule for DNS to the top of the chain, so that should fix problems with DNS providers not being able to reach the authoritative name servers.