When 500 characters are not enough ...
With a robots.txt file, you can block bots, such as search engine crawlers, from accessing parts or the entirety of your website. While you may want to let the usual search engines in, so that others can find your site, you may want to block Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT from gobbling up your content.
Here’s what you should add to your robots.txt file to stop ChatGPT, specifically:
A couple of days ago I noticed that videos and GIFs were no longer showing up in posts on my #Mastodon instance. Other images were fine, just not animated attachments to posts. I first noticed this in #Ivory, but quickly confirmed that they wouldn’t show up in a browser window either.
A quick restart of the server didn’t fix the problem. Since I didn’t have the time to dig into it, I left it at that for a few more days.
So Mastodon’s infamous Media Cache for this instance has stabilised and was running fine for the last two-and-a-half months. Still, the extra volume required some monitoring, and it does cost extra; not a lot, but quite a bit when seen in relation to the vServer’s base cost. So I was looking at the Cloud options again.
Rockers is a quirky little story with a Robin Hood-influenced ending, set in 1970s Jamaica, where everybody and their brother are in a Reggae band. They are all recording their songs onto 45s and selling them through little shops.
Our hero, who goes by the nickname Horsemouth, plays drums in various bands, but he really wants to become a record dealer, buying them from the little pressing plants and selling them on to the shops. For this, he needs a motorbike, which he gets by borrowing and scraping together the money, only to have it stolen from him on his very first round.
He manages to steal it back from what turns out to be organized crime. They don’t like that and have him beaten up. For his revenge, he summons his friends with trucks, and together they not only raid the warehouse of stolen goods but also the Mafia boss’ home, taking everything from the kitchen equipement to what’s in the living room.
The movie ends with all the liberated goods being lined up along the poor neighbourhoods – TV sets, fridges, sofas, bikes, etc. – so that everybody can take what they need.
It takes a good 1:40 hours to tell that story and there’s lots of music, of course. Almost all the dialogue is in Patois, which is hard to understand even from the subtitles. Enough to follow the story, but you may want to watch the movie twice to be sure you get everything.
(for now)
So a week after my Mastodon instance ran out of disk space, and after moving the cache to a separate volume, that volume also filled up completely. Oh well. At least the instance kept on running this time. It just couldn’t, well, cache things any more.
After running just fine for 14 days, my #Mastodon instance stopped working. All it showed was the cute animation of a mastodon banging the keyboard of a computer. My iOS app had also stopped updating my timeline. The server was quite obviously down. What happened?
So when it became obvious that #Twitter was going down the drain, I started looking for alternatives and quickly settled on #Mastodon. After a brief stint as @dirkhaun@troet.cafe I began to wonder how easy (or not) it would be to run my own instance.