If you're having issues with bot traffic, we have a trick on RetroLemmy. We use a cron that checks the server load, and when the load is too high it switches the instance into private mode (only logged in users can browse), when load goes back down again it switches to public mode again. Private mode means the bot requests use much fewer resources, but it also means the bots have no content to scrape and they probably run out of links to crawl very quickly.

https://github.com/DaDosDude/Lemmy-bot-protection

@CafeFrog@lemmy.cafe @Kris@feddit.org @Five@lemmy.cafe