Would you say the old “mlmym” design is more attractive than the new design?

anything that is plain html and doesn’t need js is more attractive for crawlers than things that aren’t plain html.

historical comparison

this doesn’t provide much historical context, it’s just for the last 7 days

Are you saying most of the blue requests are bots?

one way or another, yes. we definitely don’t have that many legitimate users trying to access it and then stopping when they get a cloudflare challenge.

Can you estimate how much it would cost to serve all the bot requests

currently no. this was a quick fix implemented when it got to the point that we couldn’t handle the traffic anymore and lemmy.world was getting outages from the load caused by these criminals. the amount of crawler traffic we see also gets spikes here and there, so what might be enough today might not be enough tomorrow. they just don’t care about anything but themselves.