this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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PieFed help

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I have to assume it's related to anti-AI measures put in place, but for the last week or so I've been bouncing between my piefed.social and piefed.zip logins because one will randomly start doing the are you human auto-CAPTCHA in a loop that never ends, but I'll be able to log in to the other normally. This first happened to me with .social about 10 days ago for at least a whole day. Then it came back. Went out again a day later. I swapped to .zip for a week, but now .zip is doing the Cloudflare thing and .social is fine. I only see the actual behavior in the browser (FF or derivative), but when using Voyager on mobile the symptom is just that the API queries time out or fail, but I'm guessing that it is the same cause.

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[–] DaddleDew@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I am. But I'm using a VPN with LibreFox so it definitely is triggering a few red flags.

[–] chickenf622@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

Same situation here. I assume AI use VPNs heavily which causes the increase.

[–] Dialectical_Specialist@quokk.au 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Are VPNs really worth the money(asking as a broke buster)?

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 points 17 hours ago

Guess that entirely depends on your internet service provider and where you live. If your ISP doesn't collect data on your web surfing, and you're not a pirate, you should be fine without a VPN.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Cloudflare proxying is off on piefed.social and the server has not caught fire yet. Hurrah!

With proxying off, all their crap security stuff is bypassed. Also all their helpful caching stuff... But I've gotten that working pretty well in nginx these days anyway.

[–] QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm getting invalid cert errors when trying to access PieFed.social now.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago

TIL debian does not come with cron installed, the service that renews certificates. So bare bones!

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

More than usual yeah.

The cynical part of me wonders if it's just to tag my activity as useful human usability patterns for future modeling.

Sadly, this actually seems pretty plausible

[–] 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

MITM Cloudflare is a travesty to the internet.

[–] url@feddit.fr 3 points 1 day ago

I'm seeing them everywhere, everywhere. I mostly use w3m(a text browser) and just think of my pain. I have to move to a regular browser just to read an article. Fuck cloudflare

[–] Tim_Bisley@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

Every website down to small independent forums are getting absolutely slammed by thousands of AI bots. They are just raping any text they can find to train their models.

[–] Ptsf@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Could be your network is being used as a residential proxy. Time to audit the logs.

[–] artifex@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

Good thought, the logs don't bear it out though, traffic seems normal (and I'm on a pretty up-to-date openwrt).

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I have only had this infinite loop happen on fediverse links. Sometimes not even Cloudflare, but ones using Anubis, too.

Since it happens only rarely, and only with links posted here on the Fediverse, I just have been assuming the server host is incorrectly configured by an amateur self-hosting type.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Is it just PieFed.* or all kinds of websites?

[–] artifex@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I see Cloudflare captchas on a lot of sites, but I've only had this problem of the neverending captcha on piefed recently.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maybe I'll turn off cloudflare and see whether anoobis alone is enough to cope.

[–] artifex@piefed.social 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)
[–] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 21 hours ago

I turned it off just after posting that comment. After a few bumps (expired SSL, no cron on the server), it worked fine although now lemmy.world isn't sending us any content. So, not really fine.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

Hmm. I haven't changed any Cloudflare config in the last week so it must be them doing what they do.

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm sorry to have to inform you of this, but it's possible you might be a bot.

[–] artifex@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I am definitely human, fellow human. For example I enjoy:

  • Breathing oxygen
  • Consuming nutrients and excreting waste
  • Many other definitely-human activities
[–] ddplf@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

Yes, you do appear to be a human person.