Not a pastor, but this is what a certain used car-company salesman is spouting:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empathy-doge/index.html

NO, HE IS NOT. The article is written from a place of ignorance, stop sharing it.

Here is a rebuttal submitted to the author:

In your recent article you showcase a term that Robert F. Kennedy is using to appeal for access to the US healthcare system: “pro-vaccine safety.” In the article this is called a “screeching U-turn.” I am writing to you today to explain that it is not.

In his book titled “The Real Anthony Fauci” Robert F. Kennedy uses the same term “pro vaccine safety” as he claims that the hundreds of millions of MMR vaccines safely distributed over the past decades - amounting in millions of lives improved - is not enough for him to believe the vaccine to be safe and effective. In ignoring such overwhelming evidence it becomes clear that claiming to be “pro vaccine safety” is a cover for RFK’s desire to dismantle one of the most significant public health improvements in American history. When articles such as yours are written indicating a change in posture, it aids RFK in rebranding his anti vaccine conspiracies to be more palatable while he yearns for control of this country-accross-the-pond’s public health systems.

After trying and failing to get used to Proton’s UX, Fastmail has been great.

That’s pretty neat. Thanks!

Thank you for the detailed reply.

keeping on top of this is a full time job!

I guess that’s why I’m interested in a tooling based solution. My selfhosting is small-fry junk, but a lot of others like me are hosting entire fedi communities or larger websites.

In that case I’m interested in tools to automate doing that.

I hadn’t heard of that before, thanks for the link.

I haven’t read through the docs yet… But PoW makes me wonder what the work is and if it’s cryptocurrency related.

Edit: Found it: https://altcha.org/docs/proof-of-work/

In the hackernews comments for that geraspora link people discussed websites shutting down due to hosting costs, which may be attributed in part to the overly aggressive crawling. So maybe it’s just a different form of DDOS than we’re used to.

A commenter in the hackernews post has created this: https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html

I’m interested, but it seems like an easy way for bots to exhaust your own server resources before they give up crawling.

Thank you for the detailed response. It’s disheartening to consider the traffic is coming from ‘real’ browsers/IPs, but that actually makes a lot of sense.

I’m coming at this from the angle of AI bots ingesting a website over and over to obsessively look for new content.

My understanding is there are two reasons to try blocking this: to protect bandwidth from aggressive crawling, or to protect the page contents from AI ingestion. I think the former is doable, and the latter is an unwinnable task. My personal reason is because I’m an AI curmudgeon, I’d rather spend CPU resources blocking bots than serving any content to them.

Thank you for the reply, but at least one commenter claims they’ll impersonate Chrome UAs.