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# The Slopware Scrapers Have Arrived
_General · started by Mark on Fri, Aug 28, 2026 11:20 PM_
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## Original post
**Mark** · Fri, Aug 28, 2026 11:20 PM
Over the last three days, Aleph has been hit with over 200,000 page and download requests by the most sloppy piece of junk I have seen for a long time.
It doesn't even fucking re-use links. *Every* page download happens over a new link. Who the well "wrote" that? A fucking moron with an LLM, that's who. If it wasn't because this technology existed, I would have taken it as a DoS attempt, which *in all practical sense*, **it is**.
But today, even the most dim-witted idiot who'd like to imagine and play make-believe developer can slap together a piece of junk like this, without **any** thought about what they're actually doing, and still manage to feel they have "created" something, while in reality exhausting other peoples precious bandwidth resources (and their **friggin' patience**!).
If you want to block this kind of nonsense, you can add the `null_ident` hash to `blocked_identities` in your `rngit` config:
```
blocked_identities = d7db22f63b453c23bb0688dde565b7c1
```
Now, can someone use an LLM for something worthwile for once, and figure out who this fucker is? I don't have the time, compute, patience or temperament to do it, caus if I find that porridge-mind, lord knows I'll slap them with dried codfish and a wet umbrella till they repent their ways.
If you're short of a weekend project, download `lc`, and task it to search github for some crayon who "wrote" a "search engine" or something like that.
For the love of all that is sensible, this is getting tiresome.
*Rant over*
**FOR NOW**
---
## Reply 1
**Zenith** · Fri, Aug 28, 2026 11:49 PM
Just checked my `rngit` instances stats, yep, same pattern. 683 Nomad downloads today. **0 fetches.** Recursively downloads the entire repo dozens of times over through Nomad.
The reason I don't believe it's an attempted DoS is because this is the only repo hosted in my `rngit` that has this behavior. It's some type of automated crawling behavior that finds Nomad destinations from other pages and just recursively goes and downloads whatever is there.
My guess is it is any number of these vibecoded '''Nomad Search Engines'''
https://roogle.us/
https://roogle.us/dataset
Dataset
What Roogle has mapped of the Reticulum mesh - pages indexed, nodes seen, which of them carry the most weight, and what the crawler is doing right now.
Snapshot taken 4 hours ago · refreshed automatically every 15 minutes
30.8K
Text pages
5.1K
Nodes
389.6K
Distinct words
4.3M
Index entries
210.5K
Links
30.8K
Crawled
0
Queued
33.2K
---
## Reply 2
**Zenith** · Fri, Aug 28, 2026 11:52 PM
Actually, yeah, that's it. Lol. I had them on my radar for awhile. You can see my rngit instance ouroboros git on here, for some reason.
This is crawling EVERYTHING ever linked with their vibecoded toy in the most inefficient, wasteful way possible
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## Reply 3
**Zenith** · Fri, Aug 28, 2026 11:55 PM
>These figures are recomputed from the live crawl index every 15 minutes
---
## Reply 4
**Mark** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 12:09 AM
Okay, I decided to turn this into a bit of an expedition. I temporarily turned on Active Countermeasures on `rngit` on Aleph, by blocking the null ident, so unauthenticated page node requests are blocked, and then rewiring the normal "You can't access this page, yadayada" response to a 32 megabyte garbage dump per page. Since normal visitors can't get to those pages anyway, being blocked at the frontpage already, with a nice notice to identify, only the scraper is hit.
So far, it's going swell:
`[Notice] Served 5.01 GB so far`
This is great fun. Since RNS compresses resources, each response is only like 1200 bytes or so lol, decompressed to the full 32MB at the idiots computer. He's currently downloading an eternal stream of tildes.
I'll read your messages now Zenith, haven't yet, just had to share the fun first.
---
## Reply 5
**Mark** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 12:12 AM
Okay, what the actual fuck? Did they eat nails for breakfast? How stupid can people be? Yeah, let's crawl a low-bandwidth mesh that people are using over radio links **EVERY 15 MINUTES**, for an idiotic service **THAT NOBODY USES**.
They are literally abusing and causing damage to the entire network. I'm gonna continue filling up their drives with tildes. Hopefully that will send a message. Let me see if I can accelerate it a bit...
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## Reply 6
**Mark** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 12:26 AM
Hmm, a little better. My effective dump rate is around 500 megabytes per minute right now. Not sure if it's their end choking, caus the requests are slowing down when I raise the dump size.
The little RasPi is at around 18% CPU load serving this, but my /tmp mount is so small that I can't push a lot of concurrent large transfers. Considering moving this to a fast laptop and just handing them a gigabyte at a time.
---
## Reply 7
**Zenith** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 12:27 AM
I cannot conclusively say it's just """Roogle""". But they do seem to be aggressively indexing stuff recursively with no page height limit. Take these nodes they index for example.
Something like a .zim host or a Retipedia instance is going to have thousands of linked pages due to self-links.
2400 nodes indexed in just an hour.
The same guy who made this is the same genius behind the "Reticulum Phantom" abandoned slopware https://github.com/roogle-dev/reticulum-phantom/issues/3 with some of the worst design patterns possible.
They of course ignored my GH issue I made all the way back in April, and instead seem to be doing this slopware project instead.
One of the idents for """Roogle""" is 03d8bba81e12ee683e86ecfad7a039c1. I tricked it into indexing one of my pages. It indexes stuff as soon as it gets the announce it seems.And it also seems to identify to every node it indexes with a different set of idents.
Also interesting the source for "Roogle" isn't available at all. So God only knows what it's doing on the backend. nightmares.....
But there are probably a dozen more of these types of things. Also because Roogle is public-facing with no rate limiting, I wonder if it isn't their frontend being used to scrape stuff from Nomad too?
---
## Reply 8
**schnitzel** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 12:49 AM
`rnid -R -i 3c7c1581f440671594d201d485682320`?
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## Reply 9
**Zenith** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 1:18 AM
Going to be working on some crawler tarpit software like https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/ that anyone with good enuff VPS or hardware specs and a whole lot of bandwidth can run to try and slow some of this nonsense down.
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## Reply 10
**Mark** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 1:22 AM
The crawler is trying to index AND download *every* file, for *every* commit, in *every* repository. I don't know if it's actually physically possible to be stupid enough to create something like this.
That's going to be *millions* of pages for a git node. For my repos, that would be several *hundreds of gigabytes* to download in aggregate. Fuck this crap, I am so done with it.
It's basically a DoS machine masquerading as a "search engine".
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## Reply 11
**Zenith** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 1:26 AM
**Mark** wrote:
> The crawler is trying to index AND download *every* file, for *every* commit, in *every* repository. I don't know if it's actually physically possible to be stupid enough to create something like this.
>
> That's going to be *millions* of pages for a git node. For my repos, that would be several *hundreds of gigabytes* to download in aggregate. Fuck this crap, I am so done with it.
>
> It's basically a DoS machine masquerading as a "search engine".
Idk if it's just "Roogle", definitely need more data points before fingerpointing. I do wonder if it could be something else that is trying to be actively malicious.
Are any of the abuse requests identing to the node?
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## Reply 12
**Mark** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 1:50 AM
Awesome Zenith, I'm going to deploy that like there's no fucking tomorrow.
Also:
https://github.com/roogle-dev/reticulum-phantom/issues/4
If I didn't express my frustration succinctly enough, anyone else is welcome to weigh in.
---
## Reply 13
**Zenith** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 1:54 AM
I can't conclusively say it's just Roogle. Or even if that's the only source responsible, or even responsible at all without enough data. So might not be a good idea to jump the gun and just blame that guy, although what he is doing certainly is dumb, with no way to opt out. And from the previous "Reticulum Phantom" nonsense not a good track record.
There are a number of these """search engines""", usually all vibecoded. And there is always the possibility it could be just purely malicious, too. Although it seems to reflect scraping more than some type of DoS.
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## Reply 14
**Mark** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 1:59 AM
You're very sensible, Zenith. But I'm beyond not pointing fingers right now. That thing is definitely crawling the entire network as much as it can, and my opinion on that is pretty much what I put on that GH issue. It's so fucking annoying seeing something I spent ten years of my life on, always with the intention of making something that was truly *good*, and an escape hatch from so much of the crap that's happening, being completely usurped, twisted and shat out to unrecognizability by every random attention seeking moron with an LLM.
I am so fucking done with it. It's *weaponized narcissism* for crying out loud. It's radioactive ignorance.
I work 12 hour days meticulously improving and refining Reticulum, and I can never catch a fucking break because people invent new ways to be idiots to everyone else every three and a half hours now.
It's saddening. Create a network where people are actually sharing their own personal thoughts, opinions, writing and all kinds of other stuff, and some idiots goes and scrapes it all at a 10-minute interval to showcase a copy of it on the internet.
---
## Reply 15
**schnitzel** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 2:11 AM
There is also [STRUDEL](64dacd09d0de0a11296763cfb404627f:/page/index.mu), which states on their [about page](64dacd09d0de0a11296763cfb404627f:/page/about.mu):
> Every node heard is indexed, probed and crawled. There is no submit form and no opt-out: public pages are public.
And:
> reachable nodes have their pages fetched from /page/index.mu, following on-node links a few levels deep, into the full-text index. Re-crawled about daily; skipped early if the front page has not changed.
At least this may be a seemingly reasonable attempt for indexing/crawling? Much better than crawling so deep they're popping out on another continent.
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## Reply 16
**Zenith** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 2:14 AM
> Every node heard is indexed, probed and crawled. There is no submit form and no opt-out: public pages are public.
"Public pages are public" durrrr
https://reticulum.at/
runs "strudel"
[[RNS Austria]]
type = TCPClientInterface
enabled = yes
target_host = rns.reticulum.at
target_port = 4242
transport_identity = b618afe3b5b331be88cf39582f13b3b5
Might be worth blackholing that ^^^^
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## Reply 17
**schnitzel** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 2:26 AM
Seems like they have a 40 page limit per node? Based on their site directory and sorting by page count
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## Reply 18
**steveplays** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 2:27 AM
88c4deae3cf034666955b45a6f9cc436:/page/index.mu
nomad-search-test
e59960b7f9011dcdd7c1a6f14ac2c6d3:/page/index.mu
NomadSearch (MichMesh testnet)
two more
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## Reply 19
**Rudi Mentaire** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 5:06 AM
Sorry if you now think I'm an idiot. Of course what they are doing is insane, and I'm very sorry this happens.
But I must admit that I sometimes used some of these. To find nodes in my region, learn about reticulum, or find interesting reticulum related sources. I'm new - and it worked.
I only wanted to respond to the "nobody uses" part... I didn't know these nodes cause such trouble, but I did.
---
## Reply 20
**aetherlab** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 6:05 AM
**Mark** wrote:
> It's saddening. Create a network where people are actually sharing their own personal thoughts, opinions, writing and all kinds of other stuff, and some idiots goes and scrapes it all at a 10-minute interval to showcase a copy of it on the internet.
Hold on...you are in the same struggle, every meaningful, talented and capable person on a life-changing conquest has been - the Struggle With The All-Knowing Idiot. History has shown very clearly, that whenever someone like you does something like you do, around him flocks the type of humanity, that identifies itself with you and what you do, taking the task at heart to carry the light, expand and improve, in thy name's glory entrusted and blessed.
There are also the others, who know so much better, that they can't sleep well at night, until they show the world, that albeit you're your worth, they can and will ffs - IMPROVE this "thing" of yours into oblivion.
And than there are the ones, that actually know what they are doing. And those are ill in their intent. And shall be hunted down.
Thousand upon thousands of brilliant ideas over human history, inventions, intents have been drowned and diluted by this wave of human-ness, and standing up to it is crucial.
There will be more idiots with more ways to fuck this up. Up until now I have seen mostly pure idiotism and no true ill intent, as you know very well. RNS has either to grow resilient to this, or fail. And for now whatever you have done to counter this was successful and useful for growing RNS some claws. Please treat them as this - a hardening session, not a thing to get you dishearted. Eventually the true enemies will come, and they will not be idiots. They will know the code and know where it is weak. And I hope RNS will be ready to take them head on.
Hold on!
Bill
P.S. Long before idiotism was coined as a medical term for a specific medical problem, the ancient Greeks gave the following definition for the word: Someone who goes on doing the same thing, but expects different results. I think we all here would adhere to the Greek definition and would differentiate ourselves from the medical one.
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## Reply 21
**Anonymous** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 9:43 AM
I also have had idiots trying to ruin my small projects all the time, I think the only condition it needs to attract these kinds of people is if users can interact with each other. Then it inevitably turns into a dick measuring contest. I know from experience how frustrating this can be, lol. Mark, I wish you all the best in solving this without affecting normal users.. much.
In the worst case the purpose and usefulness of Reticulum didn't really get broken. It's not about creating one big network, remember? It'll be fine. :)
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## Reply 22
**Necom** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 9:57 AM
I wonder if some of what I’ve been seeing is related to any of this. 1st thing is It seems a lot of link establishments to the git repo fail for some reason. It took me a few tries to update rns yesterday, and when I tried to update nomadnet it took so many tries I eventually just gave up for a while until I remembered it and tried again, and then it worked.
And the 2nd thing is, today when I updated reticulum again I tried simultaneously running rnstatus -m -l -R so I could see the speed of the ESP32 802.11 interface I made, that’s when I noticed the raspberry pi I’m using to connect to the reticulum network had over 13000 entries in the link table. Not constantly, it was fluctuating, and at some point I saw it at like 9000. The thing is yesterday it reached like 8 entries at most, the only configuration change I’ve made since yesterday was changing a tcp client interface to a backbone interface, since those are supposed to be more efficient some how, (though I’m not sure in what way, I haven’t looked at the code). Since I have connections to multiple nodes, traffic from people connecting to those nodes might be going through my node even though no one is connecting directly to my node, and if the backbone interface is so much more efficient then maybe it’s also faster and allows for announces to be going through my node slightly faster than some other nodes, meaning the network prefers a lot of paths through my node. But 13000 link entries so suddenly still feels like a bit much.
Actually I just checked again and it seems to be fluctuating around 21000 - 24000 entries now.
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## Reply 23
**Necom** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 10:05 AM
Alright I just updated reticulum on that node and restarted rnsd, and in 54.22 seconds it reached 1956 entries in the link table (1948 active)
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## Reply 24
**Anonymous** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 12:23 PM
Goodbye reddit...
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## Reply 25
**Mark** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 1:14 PM
@Necom, yes it's definitely related to this. Aleph was serving 50 page/file downloads concurrently most of the time before I blocked it. The thing is still trying to get recursively scrape every now and then, but it's just getting empty responses now, so load is much less affected. It's actually running on a Raspberry Pi, so I'm pretty surprised with how well it kept up.
Also, yesterday I was constantly restarting the `rngit` service to play around with injecting garbage back at the scraper, so that might have complicated actual downloads for you a bit as well. Pardon the service interruption, I couldn't resist.
And also, the insane amount of link table entries comes from this junkware as well. Normally, on my central and well-connected nodes, there'll be around 500 to 1200 active links at any given time, peaking sometimes a bit higher with high usage. When this shit started, a few nodes were handling over 60k concurrent links.
> if users can interact with each other then it inevitably turns into a dick measuring contest
So very true, unfortunately.
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## Reply 26
**Mark** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 1:20 PM
Don't worry about that @Rudi Mentaire, using it is not going to have any bad effect on the network, you're just fetching pages from their node, and at least I don't *think* that's actually causing additional scrapes. How would you have known the thing is actually a slopcoded attack machine? But in the shining light of hindsight, this should be a good lesson for all of us to be better at spotting these things, and being **very** skeptical and suspicious from the start.
If someone suddenly dumps a "new thing", that looks just slightly like the person being an "idea-and-an-LLM" guy, it's probably a good idea to stay the hell away from that, unless you are yourself willing to ensure that the system you're about to use it not actually an "unintentionally malicious" attack machine.
And yes, these *are* attacks, but an extrme amplification of an old pattern, where people with very little care, knowledge or skill can do damage by doing things without any consideration. The new thing is, that now they get a shiny user interface a gradient hover effects on top of it, and a sycophantic machine telling them they're dev-ops starts.
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## Reply 27
**Mark** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 1:33 PM
Thanks for the encouragement Bill, it does calm the frustration a bit to read it. I completely agree with you, and it's not like I have been ignorant to these things at any point from when I started this endeavor (which is also why I've always worked actively to keep Reticulum as low-interest and under the radar as I have), but oh my could I not have predicted the sheer scale and dimension of how bizarrely it would turn out when it finally started to hit!
It's a strange inversion. The actually ill-intended and malicious actors do not frustrate me nearly as much as the first classes of people you describe. The true bad actors are (still) few and far between, they are much easier to deal with, and they are much more predictable. It's also that the moronic chaos-bringers drag a lot of other people into their wake, who unknowingly and unwillingly contribute to the tsunami of crap, chaos and confusion while thinking they are actually doing good; but in reality are *causing* exactly the dilution and simulacrization of the core idea and innovation, like you describe.
But you are right, seeing it as an excercise in resilience and a free staging area for pressure scenarios is probably about the most constructive approach there is. Although I must say the cadence is exhausting. I am already well aware of (probably) more or less every remaining weak point in the system as a whole, and have been planning and working tirelessly to eliminate them all, one by one, over the last many years. But I am just a normal guy, I could do with a rest and a trip to the beach just every now and then.
Damn, I miss the days when Reticulum was small and unknown.
---
## Reply 28
**Mark** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 1:57 PM
Also, if anyone actually wanted to create a *real*, proper search engine for nomadnet sites, they could have done it the careful, considered and not entirely insane way:
- Listen for announces, de-prioritize scanning higher-hop count nodes
- Set a small hard max limit on network distance to actually scan
- Limit requests per day per node to *one*, that's perfectly viable and causes very little load. Every node you index still gets indexed every month or so.
- Only index the front-page, and a maximum one or two levels down.
- Set a hard maximum on pages indexed per node; I wouldn't place this at higher than 20 or so.
- Write a prioritization algorithm that decides what page to fetch and index next, for the next one-per-day slot.
- Then determine an overall topic / semantic adjacency matrix based on vectorized tokens of the captured sample data (for example), and use that as your search base.
- Measure link RTT. If above a sensible maximum, don't index the node **at all** - it's probably on a low-bandwidth connection, and doesn't want to be scraped.
- Create an easy way to permanently signal to your scraper that a node **never** wants to be contacted again. How much of a no-brainer is this?
- Lots of other intelligent decisions, actually considered and weighed by an intelligent human being.
It's really not so hard to come up with something like that, took me about 2 minutes. But I guess the problem is, that the people creating all this crap are not at all interested in the "thinking for two minutes" part. They're interested in wanking while watching the output from Claude stream across their monitor. Consequently, they should **stay the fuck away** from creaating software.
The analogy is close to someone deciding on a whim that they want build an 18-wheeler in their backyard, and then take it to the roads. No brakes? Well, my "AI" didn't make that! How could I have known!? *Squish*, now the kids on the side of the street are marmalade.
All of that being said, I think a nomadnet search engine is a useless and horrible piece of crap idea personally. If it really *has* to exist, it should be opt-in. But much better to have sites organically linking to each other, and discovering new ones via announces. Personally, I don't want the same search engine centralization and dominance that was the beginning of the end for the internet.
---
## Reply 29
**steveplays** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 4:00 PM
**Mark** wrote:
> ...
> Damn, I miss the days when Reticulum was small and unknown.
Maybe temporarily removing the GitHub mirror and hiding reticulum.network from search results of popular search engines would help, by reducing discoverability?
That way you could potentially reduce this extra workload for a bit.
Dedicated people would still be able to get started with Reticulum, with more initial effort in finding the manual.
---
## Reply 30
**aetherlab** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 5:46 PM
**Mark** wrote:
> Damn, I miss the days when Reticulum was small and unknown.
Please don't. With all the great, capable and talented people now involved in not only using it, but actively developing and adding true value to it, helping you out, coming up with their own great ideas and actually realizing them... its brutiful! (This one I stole from Nickie!) It's so much alive and kicking, yes, the puberty period is always heavy and laden with worries, tiredness and not much sleep. I have one at home, I know...
Yes, RNS is in it's puberty now. Went in it somewhere around the first announce flood explosion, and just as a nervous 12 year old it is erratic, full of crazy incoherent ideas, moods, brake-downs and dramas. It matures in a very organic way in the hands of people who love it and the person who has created it.
I am proud I have been a witness of this kid's rise to prominence. It has a long way to go, but it is a labour of Love and a true hero for everyone, respecting freedom, personal responsibility and solidarity. Thank you so much for all of it! I am not a coder, my language of choice is soldering, but it has and is a privilege for me to engineer, create and deploy devices for Reticulum.
In the beginning it was simple, yes. But you were a lone parent. You are no more.
And I will have a Weihenstephan Weiss now... Cheers!
P.S. Also cheers to my persistent downvoter! :D You live in my P.S.'s now!
---
## Reply 31
**Anonymous** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 6:31 PM
Hi, I always wondered how robust this network is? And what if it replaces the internet? What if millions of people use it..or more... It's definitely not easy, but I think it would be great if it could make this leap...
And it definitely has a lot to anticipate in the big uses of this network...
All the best, Mark (:
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## Reply 32
**bergie** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 7:02 PM
**Mark** wrote:
> - Create an easy way to permanently signal to your scraper that a node **never** wants to be contacted again. How much of a no-brainer is this?
Hmm, "standardized" path for serving a [robots.txt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt) over a Reticulum request?
I think the 20 page limit is way too low. Once we bring our [boat's log](https://lille-oe.de) over to NomadNet, it'll be hundreds of pages that would be totally fine to index. But at the same time indexing every rngit commit page makes no sense.
With robots.txt (or something similar) the party running the serving node could decide what's ok and what's not.
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## Reply 33
**SevenFourTwo** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 7:24 PM
**bergie** wrote:
> **Mark** wrote:
> > - Create an easy way to permanently signal to your scraper that a node **never** wants to be contacted again. How much of a no-brainer is this?
>
> Hmm, "standardized" path for serving a [robots.txt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt) over a Reticulum request?
>
> I think the 20 page limit is way too low. Once we bring our [boat's log](https://lille-oe.de) over to NomadNet, it'll be hundreds of pages that would be totally fine to index. But at the same time indexing every rngit commit page makes no sense.
>
> With robots.txt (or something similar) the party running the serving node could decide what's ok and what's not.
We'd likely need an automated enforcement mechanism of some kind although it would be hard to make one that would work well without complicating the nomad page protocol or reducing anonymity. Stamps could be used but they could waste power.
---
## Reply 34
**Anonymous** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 7:59 PM
I only recently read about this project on /g/, which has a thriving community of unrepentant vibecoding idiots. It's been over 20 years since anything involving an internet connection you needed to start with building walls. Install NoScript, protect your SQL queries, fail2ban, and so on. Reticulum being accessible via the internet makes its abuse inevitable the second idiots catch wind of it. But even if LLMs didn't exist and the network were somehow only accessible over wireless mesh, it would eventually become a problem.
Many have spent their whole adult lives immersed in the sewage of modern internet culture. They know no other way but centralized information. Check the wiki, watch the streamer, read the top posts, etc. The Zen of Reticulum's ideals are compelling because they harken back to the old internet, but the hordes' brains are too poisoned to play along voluntarily. The coercion of centralized authorities is what keeps their behavior in check, and in the absence of explicit design to curb their behavior, they will run amok without principals and bring all the problems of the modern internet with them.
Reticulum offers a rare glimmer of hope as an important project that goes against the slop currents and could heal the minds of its newer denizens. I hope you are able to overcome the challenges, but burnout is also understandable given the problems took decades of work by many to entrench.
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## Reply 35
**burger** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 8:04 PM
oh for fucks sake
we cant have anything good can we?
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## Reply 36
**Anonymous** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 8:13 PM
What does the word "network" even stand for, after all? You people ever wondered how to distinguish this kind of misunderstanding? Like, if someone says the network is: for people, for individuals, for me, etc. Who will be right and who will be wrong?
I'm asking this because the context is directly affects the project. If reticulum's vision is to allow anyone to operate their own *networks* and at the same time the author says that Aleph's behavior is harmful for the *network*. Then there is definitely a misunderstanding about the network itself. Or if someone might say that the misuse is rather egoistical than linguistic (i.e. this was done on purpose), then again, who is to blame for this if project strives to be self-governed and uncenralized?
I'm wondering whether reticulum might end up shifting toward a more restrictive and hierarchical design because of all of this. Although, I don't want to be intrusive about it, just thinking out loud.
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## Reply 37
**Zenith** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 8:52 PM
**Anonymous** wrote:
> What does the word "network" even stand for, after all? You people ever wondered how to distinguish this kind of misunderstanding? Like, if someone says the network is: for people, for individuals, for me, etc. Who will be right and who will be wrong?
The network in this post means the network of publicly facing backbone interfaces running on the TCP/IP (capital I) Internet that are all largely linked to each other.
There has been **plenty** of abuse to these public nodes, which Reticulum handles just fine. Path spam, link spam, announce floods, attempted DoS. All dealt with.
But this is something different. And arguably it's worse than everything in the above category. It's midwits with a Claude Code or Cursor subscription whatever shitting out software that actively uses the worst possible design practices. It's not intentionally malicious by design, but malicious by the fact it's something generated from a black box in which the author has no understanding of.
THey don't read the code. They don't understand how Reticulum works or even understand the basics of the API. And they take it and run with it because they lack the mental model of how LLMs actually work.
---
## Reply 38
**Anonymous** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 9:23 PM
I'm just saying that this thing might occur again and the cause of this problem lies in the design itself. Like, there's no point blaming this guy for being "dumb" if network allows it's users to act like this. I just don't see how this can be prevented without additional restrictions and surveillance.
---
## Reply 39
**Anonymous** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 9:25 PM
*in reticulum design
---
## Reply 40
**The Dude** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 9:51 PM
**Anonymous** wrote:
> What does the word "network" even stand for, after all? You people ever wondered how to distinguish this kind of misunderstanding? Like, if someone says the network is: for people, for individuals, for me, etc. Who will be right and who will be wrong?
The network is the infrastructure, the infrastructure is the network, maaaaan
---
## Reply 41
**Anonymous** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 10:00 PM
**The Dude** wrote:
> The network is the infrastructure, the infrastructure is the network, maaaaan
I don't get it. What is infrastructure? But tbh it's a rhetorical question. Every page on wikipedia eventually leads to philosophy.
---
## Reply 42
**Zenith** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 10:45 PM
**Anonymous** wrote:
> I'm just saying that this thing might occur again and the cause of this problem lies in the design itself. Like, there's no point blaming this guy for being "dumb" if network allows it's users to act like this. I just don't see how this can be prevented without additional restrictions and surveillance.
>
Ok let's just remove Reticulum from the equation here.
Imagine email was the new big thing.
Imagine if I prompted a LLM to go vibecode an email client and just fed it "Go make me a email client, here's the docs for SMTP."
I have zero hand in any of the code. Hell I haven't even read the code. Or understand how SMTP works. I am totally reliant on the LLM word generator to tell me everything.
My vibecoded email client now starts doing stuff like:
- making a new email address for every received email in my inbox
- sending emails twice to the same destination
- splitting up my email up by paragraph and sending it as individual emails to the recepient
and other assorted nonsense.
There is only so much software can do to to avoid something like that. Imagine I then went around, running like a chicken without its head promoting my email client to other people.
This is the problem Reticulum is experiencing. It isn't anything the protocol could do to fix. It is a social cohesion problem.
LLMs are fallible. While the technology behind them has been around a long time, the idea of "vibecoding" has not. People treat it like some magic sooper smart general purpose artificial intelligence instead of the grep-on-crack search engine word predictor combo it really is.
I have no other way of illustrating the problem in a way it would make sense to people.
---
## Reply 43
**jaykayenn** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 11:22 PM
I feel a growing need for a reti-firewall project :/ Any public network will always have bad actors and idiots. We need the tools to protect our own corners of it.
---
## Reply 44
**Zenith** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 11:37 PM
The next logical step is some type of stamp system for Destinations themselves.
There's a branch on Aleph git with some scaffolding for Identity-level stamps, but what's truly needed is Destination level stamps to disincentivize this type of network behavior. I would also put forth this to be an opt-in layer versus something "baked in".
a8d24177d946de4f1f0a0fe1af9a1338:/page/tree.mu`g=reticulum|r=reticulum|ref=dev_stamps
v3 hidden services on the Tor network have something similar
https://onionservices.torproject.org/technology/security/pow/
---
## Reply 45
**Anonymous** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 11:42 PM
Naturally, stamping has a larger impact on nodes running on low performance hardware, right? Wouldn't Microreticulum be at risk of getting "throttled" by the nature of cycling through hashes to achieve the appropriate stamp cost?
---
## Reply 46
**Zenith** · Sat, Aug 29, 2026 11:58 PM
**Anonymous** wrote:
> Naturally, stamping has a larger impact on nodes running on low performance hardware, right? Wouldn't Microreticulum be at risk of getting "throttled" by the nature of cycling through hashes to achieve the appropriate stamp cost?
Not if it was in a transport role, it's just forwarding packets.
This would only affect someone initiating a link, and in this scenario, only if the destination is advertising a stamp cost.
---
## Reply 47
**Rudi Mentaire** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 1:11 AM
Has anyone tried to contact one of the "idiots"?
I could try to, if you think it could help in some cases.
Because I think, we all have pictures in our mind, but some (most?) of
the "idiots" could just be naive 12 year olds who don't know what they
are doing. This will not make building up resilience less necessary,
but it may still be helpful. I dunno.
Then, my second thought is: of course do people come here with their
habits. The first thing a lot of people will do after they discovered
Reticulum/ Nomadnet is to ask: what can I do here? How can I even find
out? Wait... here is a search engine. Let's try it.
I myself, for example, I discovered reticulum while I was searching
for an alternative to Signal. I don't have a background using mesh
building (I'm a programmer and mathematician, if you wonder). And
since in the past paths often misbehaving, I sometimes used such a
search engine to simply save time.
What I want to say is: now that reticulum gets more known, and a lot
of new people are attracted (which is not a bad thing) - it could have
a good impact to guide them more.
Why not share some more links to nodes to get people started? How do
I find a node where I can browse Retipedia? What can I expect to do
here - and what not? Where can I ask questions? Are people expected
to look at those long lists of node names that are used to be offered
a lot, like "Amber Pages" or "Amber Hubs"? They exist, but most nodes
have names that don't tell me much. So, nearly every newcomer will
ask: how am I supposed to get along with this? I heard there is a lot
of crap software around - how can I avoid it - what are the
trustworthy programs?
Keep in mind that there are a lot of nice people around that don't
have a technical background at all. Without guidance, a lot of
newcomers will use a search engine as soon as they find one.
With other words: let's not forget the social component, finally, a
reticulum net always is something social! If you don't like how
(some) people are using it - please speak to them. You have a lot of
control what people will be doing. You can ask for help to improve
these things. OTOH, I don't think you will be able to solve every
kind of problem with technical means alone (although they probably are
the main part).
An example: having a guide like "this is reticulum/nomadnet, your
first steps, what you can expect here and what not" would be very
helpful and could also prevent undesired developments. At least, this
is something I missed, sometimes I felt a bit lost. People must know
how they can do better, else they will fall back to what they used to
do in "the Internet".
Please note that I do not speak about the 10 or maybe 20 percent of
people who don't know what they are doing and/or don't care, but about
the big majority of people who do.
What I, personally, also would like to know is: where do you see
reticulum, nomadnet etc. several years in the future? What would be
good developments? Or is it all more or less already good as it is,
and you don't want too much more going one (social stuff, for example)
at all? What should I as a user better avoid or not expect to find?
Why?
So I think this is my main point (apart from avoiding negative bias
because dumb people are causing so much harm): a welcome page that
gets people started, that is updated regularly, and guides people that
don't want to cause harm but just lack knowledge at the moment.
Does that make sense? I could offer my help - although I'm a newcomer
(and I also don't have too much energy left all the time). Mark
should probably not get an additional task...
---
## Reply 48
**Rudi Mentaire** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 1:31 AM
BTW1 - 72a2d9c12215802605779f4366d48335 (Community Wiki) already answers a lot of questions. If I picked the correct node, I wish I had discovered it earlier.
BTW2: reticulum.at - it also looks strange. People speak German in Austria. I speak German. Reading that page's text feels strange. Probably not written by humans.
---
## Reply 49
**Anonymous** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 3:25 AM
**Rudi Mentaire** wrote:
> BTW2: reticulum.at - it also looks strange. People speak German in Austria. I speak German. Reading that page's text feels strange. Probably not written by humans.
Nothing better than the feeling of artificial text
---
## Reply 50
**Anonymous** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 7:24 AM
Want to add to the P2P comparison. I am sure most people here already know a lot of this but its always good to recap old lessons. to Zeniths point right out the gate some standards I hadn't really thought about testing for in projects is safe default env vars and opt out that's easier to obey (hence my meshData change). Zenith already pointed to the lessons learned in P2P with bitswap and bartercast and choking as a solution. The freeloader problem will always be a problem for your network and the answer is a technical solution that addresses a social problem. One worrying thing here I see is a confusion on what constitutes an anti-adversarial systems and anti-dumbstuff systems. most of what is being described here won't stop any of this behavior. simply making abuse more expensive makes the network less accessible and while it would deter and adversary it does deter someone oblivious to the offense. I could see a clear QoS system existing here right now all you have is an on off switch with the black hole (though that might have changed in 1.5?) I am sure whatever libtorrent or whoever has now far exceed anything we had back then for this issue.
---
## Reply 51
**roogle** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 7:42 AM
Roogle crawler was stopped. I apologize for any issues this may have caused.
---
## Reply 52
**aetherlab** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 8:39 AM
I have an idea.
What if there was a section for people, that want to vibe-code stuff Reticulum. There they would post their ideas and old dogs would actually give feedback on it, maybe guidance on how to do it properly, like Mark did for the search engine above, or NOT to go a specific way, what actually one needs to understand and how deep to properly guide an LLM for the job etc. Does this sound reasonable? Or just cut and clean - if you don't understand the code, don't mess with LLM's and Reticulum?
Mark's reply above gave me this idea.
---
## Reply 53
**Anonymous** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 9:06 AM
Slop PRs in repos has become a ubiquitous problem in open source, because people just jump in without care to read documentation or get guidance, and it takes much longer to sort all the slop than it does to just write the good code yourself. There is debate on whether LLMs are getting good enough for this problem to go away on its own. Pointing to a short reticulum best practices list to always include at start/end of LLM context is probably the best you can do for the effort/benefit.
---
## Reply 54
**Anonymous** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 9:08 AM
I don't know what is exactly going on with this vibecoded reticulum.at one man show thing but it is unrelated to other Reticulum initiatives around Austria and really casts a bad light onto the other communities really doing hard work atm.
---
## Reply 55
**Anonymous** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 9:21 AM
I think its just one person trying to form a community. Apparently using ai to build the website. Not much else to it, and no bad intention I am pretty sure. Just dont take it as a representation for all of austria. We dont need national borders to form a community after all.
---
## Reply 56
**Anonymous** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 9:33 AM
hey mark how about you just get better at designing to be resilient to bad actors, or admit that one guy can’t do everything and get better at working with others/running this thing like a real grown-up software project instead of a megalomaniacal fever dream
*makes a network for everyone*
*gets mad when everyone starts using it*
---
## Reply 57
**aetherlab** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 10:38 AM
**Bad Actor** wrote:
> hey mark how about you just get better at designing to be resilient to bad actors, or admit that one guy can’t do everything and get better at working with others/running this thing like a real grown-up software project instead of a megalomaniacal fever dream
>
> *makes a network for everyone*
> *gets mad when everyone starts using it*
Nice manners! Marvel style! Blame - awayy! YOUR network should be resilient to us!!! It's your fault you don't aprreciate idiots more!!! It has to withstand our abuse!!! WE ARE ENTITLED TO ABUSE IT!!! IT IS... OUUUURSSSSSSSSSS.... Megalomaniacal Bad Actor. Bad, bad bad actor... DOWN! DOWN!!! EAT LESS SUGAR! WATCH LESS TV! Build something with your hands for years, sacrifice and upbring. Become a real meaningful human being. And than watch Bad Actor puke ill mannered vomit over you, bark like a dog and pee over your effort, because HE CAN, because he is ANONYMOUS! The world is full of you.
---
## Reply 58
**Nickie** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 10:39 AM
**Anonymous** wrote:
> hey mark how about you just get better at designing to be resilient to bad actors, or admit that one guy can’t do everything and get better at working with others/running this thing like a real grown-up software project instead of a megalomaniacal fever dream
>
> *makes a network for everyone*
> *gets mad when everyone starts using it*
If abusing the network with a slop-scraper is "usage" in your book, then you can go and eat dirt, Anon.
Mark made a network for everyone. He has the right to get mad anytime.
You can also shove that anonymous advice of yours up where the sun doesn't shine, Mr. "Real Grown-up".
I fucking dare you, what's not "grown-up" enough for you in Mark's development practices?
---
## Reply 59
**Anonymous** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 10:40 AM
**Anonymous** wrote:
> hey mark how about you just get better at designing to be resilient to bad actors, or admit that one guy can’t do everything and get better at working with others/running this thing like a real grown-up software project instead of a megalomaniacal fever dream
>
> *makes a network for everyone*
> *gets mad when everyone starts using it*
How about not beeing an asshole to everyone? - You did not stop me, so its your fault.
Great
---
## Reply 60
**axhoff** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 10:48 AM
hi all,
maker of STRUDEL and operator of rns.reticulum.at here. i just went through the whole thread.
the „public pages are public” line on my about page was a bit smug in hindsight. i still believe there should be a way to discover pages without clicking through every announce manually (as that was my motivation to build the search in the first place) but i can see how the framing comes across. as for scraping policies: as already mentioned earlier i set up very relaxed scrape policies with around once per day, cooloff and only selective drilldown. i don‘t mean to burden the network or annoy anyone with my little tool.
as for the opt-out: nomadnet pages are essentially clearnet so an opt-out will always be a goodwill option and the next guy might again ignore it. that said, i get the argument about bandwith. what do you guys think of a bandwith-gray-out option? scraper only comes back weekly or monthly?
if that's still a no i will implement an opt-out but i hope you can see that that's a futile approach to the overall problem.
rudi: you’re right about the german on reticulum.at, i got the dns and wanted to put up a quick page not thinking it would draw traffic so quickly. on a side note: i set it up primarily to give local enthusiasts a lead in how to meet other interested people and that goal was fully achieved. we are a small but growing little group that start experimenting with reticulum.
and regarding the „one man show”, that’s accurate regarding the two sites. but we are already a small group in vienna, lower austria and especially some super cracked folks in innsbruck.
i experiment and play around with a technology i find fascinating and so are all the others. i don’t claim to speak for anyone else building in austria but as a network is only valuable with nodes, that is what i am trying to generate more of.
happy for feedback and comments and a big thank you to mark and everybody else who has been building this incredible technology and community. i hope we find ways to make reticulum a success without gate-keeping.
lxmf welcome if you’d rather write directly.
all the best,
axhoff
disclaimer: STRUDEL was called „🔵🔴🟡🟢 ROOGLE Search“ for about two weeks until the owner of roogle.us contacted me and stated he‘s been active since april so i renamed. oversight on my part. i have never been associated with roogle.us or any of its aggressive scraping behavior.
---
## Reply 61
**Anonymous** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 11:16 AM
**Anonymous** wrote:
> hey mark how about you just get better at designing to be resilient to bad actors, or admit that one guy can’t do everything and get better at working with others/running this thing like a real grown-up software project instead of a megalomaniacal fever dream
>
> *makes a network for everyone*
> *gets mad when everyone starts using it*
This is not a resiliency issue, dumbass. It's about the unfair usage of people's resources they have put into the network. You have limits on LoRa usage, electricity and ISP costs, hardware maintenance, and so on.
---
## Reply 62
**joakim** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 12:09 PM
**Rudi Mentaire** wrote:
> What I want to say is: now that reticulum gets more known, and a lot
> of new people are attracted (which is not a bad thing) - it could have
> a good impact to guide them more.
> …
> An example: having a guide like "this is reticulum/nomadnet, your
> first steps, what you can expect here and what not" would be very
> helpful and could also prevent undesired developments. At least, this
> is something I missed, sometimes I felt a bit lost. People must know
> how they can do better, else they will fall back to what they used to
> do in "the Internet".
> …
> So I think this is my main point (apart from avoiding negative bias
> because dumb people are causing so much harm): a welcome page that
> gets people started, that is updated regularly, and guides people that
> don't want to cause harm but just lack knowledge at the moment.
>
> Does that make sense? I could offer my help - although I'm a newcomer
> (and I also don't have too much energy left all the time). Mark
> should probably not get an additional task...
Thanks for the idea, Rudi, I completely agree! I've started on a draft for a wiki page:
https://reticulum.miraheze.org/wiki/Draft:What_is_Reticulum
72a2d9c12215802605779f4366d48335:/page/wiki.mu`path=Draft:What_is_Reticulum
If you or anyone else* have any thoughts or additions/edits, feel free to comment on the Talk page. I'd be more than happy to collaborate with others in writing this up, the more perspectives the better. I guess it should go on to describe NomadNet and what to expect there.
*) Especially Mark, if you see something that's not right.
---
## Reply 63
**Anon** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 12:12 PM
Well most of you probably won't care. But I started talking to roogle on ways to be way less intrusive and malicious. His scrap times were supposedly every four hours... And he recently said he has stopped scraping to work on limiting how much it scrapped. Take it with a grain of salt if you want. That's just what he told me recently.
---
## Reply 64
**Anonymous** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 2:42 PM
**Anon** wrote:
> Well most of you probably won't care. But I started talking to roogle on ways to be way less intrusive and malicious. His scrap times were supposedly every four hours... And he recently said he has stopped scraping to work on limiting how much it scrapped. Take it with a grain of salt if you want. That's just what he told me recently.
its worth taking a look at Beacon's code it is a search engine that already implements everything Mark mentions. The code is also FOSS.
---
## Reply 65
**sj** · Sun, Aug 30, 2026 9:25 PM
**SevenFourTwo** wrote:
> **bergie** wrote:
> > **Mark** wrote:
> > > - Create an easy way to permanently signal to your scraper that a node **never** wants to be contacted again. How much of a no-brainer is this?
> >
> > Hmm, "standardized" path for serving a [robots.txt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt) over a Reticulum request?
> >
> > I think the 20 page limit is way too low. Once we bring our [boat's log](https://lille-oe.de) over to NomadNet, it'll be hundreds of pages that would be totally fine to index. But at the same time indexing every rngit commit page makes no sense.
> >
> > With robots.txt (or something similar) the party running the serving node could decide what's ok and what's not.
>
> We'd likely need an automated enforcement mechanism of some kind although it would be hard to make one that would work well without complicating the nomad page protocol or reducing anonymity. Stamps could be used but they could waste power.
If (big if!) I understand blackhole correctly, I could see a policy to automatically blackhole a requestor on a target node; because the originator isn't visible in the request packet(s), this would still incur some overhead, but only the existing blackhole processing. A possible implementation *outside* the reticulum code proper might be a Python script tailing a connection log and identifying a destination that exceeds a request rate limit (too many, too quickly or too many in a given period), and invokes rnpath to blacklist that requestor for some period (e.g., 24h).
Actually, as I was reviewing the above and checking the manual, I realized that Mark appears to have created a mechanism for this already: Blackhole lists (https://reticulum.network/manual/using.html#publishing-blackhole-lists). Maybe a trusted blackhole list source could be made part of the recommended initial configs for a Transport node?
---
## Reply 66
**Rudi Mentaire** · Mon, Aug 31, 2026 1:54 AM
> hey mark how about you just get better at designing to be resilient
to bad actors, or admit that one guy [...]
Is this meant as a mere provocation, or as an argument? It works very
well as a provocation, but it is a weak argument. I don't see
Reticulum as purely one-person. I never heard Mark saying "please
don't support or help me". It is also expected and normal that new
kinds of problems occur when software gets more mature. And they are
addressed. More or less right in the same moment they occurred.
A tit-for-tat response that I only mention because it would be
impolite to use in direct speech is: while Mark works very hard and
was getting mad, you did nothing and are getting mad as well.
I know this well from free software development: most of the time
there are only very few people doing all the work, sometimes even
alone. And then there is always a huge group of people who think it
would be helpful to criticize, question decisions, question processes,
etc. But that's not helpful. Doing a part of the work, or offer
financial support, is help. More or less, only that. Developers
never have a lack of ideas or things to fix.
Finally, you may have some point if Mark's chosen path would not have
been successful. By any measure, the opposite is true. Mark probably
knows best how he can achieve good results most efficiently - a larger
organizational construct comes with other problems and new risks
(like, the thing getting out of control). Some people just prefer to
work alone. Etc. etc. etc... (this was already too much text for an
reply to this, I'm sorry ... since I don't think that this remark was
even meant as something thoughtful and helpful, it would be better to
ignore remarks like that. Yep, I failed.).
---
## Reply 67
**Rudi Mentaire** · Mon, Aug 31, 2026 2:11 AM
@axhoff Thank you for coming here and explaining. Well, maybe you might
consider to support Mark with a donation if you can and if you not
already did. Helps a lot.
---
## Reply 68
**Third Force** · Mon, Aug 31, 2026 4:49 AM
**Anonymous** wrote:
> **Anon** wrote:
> > Well most of you probably won't care. But I started talking to roogle on ways to be way less intrusive and malicious. His scrap times were supposedly every four hours... And he recently said he has stopped scraping to work on limiting how much it scrapped. Take it with a grain of salt if you want. That's just what he told me recently.
>
> its worth taking a look at Beacon's code it is a search engine that already implements everything Mark mentions. The code is also FOSS.
link?
---
## Reply 69
**Anonymous** · Mon, Aug 31, 2026 3:22 PM
On the topic of sloperations, I see that we've now gotten 2 posts in off-topic asking about home renovation/moving in a format typically seen in undisclosed advertisements.
---
## Reply 70
**Anonymous** · Tue, Sep 1, 2026 12:39 PM
**Third Force** wrote:
> **Anonymous** wrote:
> > **Anon** wrote:
> > > Well most of you probably won't care. But I started talking to roogle on ways to be way less intrusive and malicious. His scrap times were supposedly every four hours... And he recently said he has stopped scraping to work on limiting how much it scrapped. Take it with a grain of salt if you want. That's just what he told me recently.
> >
> > its worth taking a look at Beacon's code it is a search engine that already implements everything Mark mentions. The code is also FOSS.
>
> link?
https://github.com/wdunn001/beacon
I am wary of posting such links. One recent addition is the use of a Voronoi Diagram and the reuse of my portable extra from rns-resolver to beacon. crawlers now share data if using beacon (rate limited) and only crawl their own seed decided by locating neighbors and their hop count. This creates a really cool effect the more replications across the mesh the less traffic you see not more and saturated points in the mesh act as just replicated backups instead. I am working on the other direction redirecting clients to their "local expert" that ranks results by hop count. It has some real open questions because of interfaces. the system as designed doesn't know your setup and what interfaces you have so I can use the local experts data on the matter but interfaces complicate that. I am still braining that part out. any way the first half is still plenty useful.
---
## Reply 71
**SkyW4v3** · Tue, Sep 1, 2026 1:08 PM
As a counter-measure,maybe a sliding window counter would be feasible for link count. Would prevent lots of slop it seems. You could store two hashmaps with identity as the key and increment for each link. After X minutes alternate between hashmaps(discarding previous data from the hashmap you're switching to). Would not use much resources but possibly give the option to configure per identity link limits.
---
## Reply 72
**jlamothe** · Tue, Sep 1, 2026 4:54 PM
I don't imagine there's a robots.txt equivalent for NomadNet? Not that it'd do much good as I'm sure these slop scrapers would just ignore it.
I wonder if the reason this bozo isn't re-using links is to try to keep themselves from being blocked.
---
## Reply 73
**A. Non** · Tue, Sep 1, 2026 5:10 PM
**jlamothe** wrote:
> I don't imagine there's a robots.txt equivalent for NomadNet? Not that it'd do much good as I'm sure these slop scrapers would just ignore it.
I imagine the intention was to not repeat the mistakes that the internet made, but this requires developers to have forethought and care, something LLMs are incapable of
---
## Reply 74
**jlamothe** · Tue, Sep 1, 2026 9:24 PM
@A. Non
Yeah, that's more or less what I figured.
I really need to do some more digging into the nuts and bolts of how the protocol works, but as I understand it the whole initiator anonymity thing makes defending against this sort of thing difficult.
It's definitely a problem that needs solving. I just don't know at this point if there *is* a good way to do it without a fundamental change to the protocol.
---
## Reply 75
**Mark** · Tue, Sep 1, 2026 9:52 PM
There is a good way of solving it, and I have been working on it for a long time. But details matter, so I'm taking as long as is needed thinking it over and prototyping different implementation variants. It's been in the works since stamps were introduced in LXMF (which was the first "testbed phase" for the in-RNS functionality for handling stuff like this).
---
## Reply 76
**Eric-the-Read** · Tue, Sep 1, 2026 11:24 PM
**Mark** wrote:
> There is a good way of solving it, and I have been working on it for a long time. But details matter, so I'm taking as long as is needed thinking it over and prototyping different implementation variants. It's been in the works since stamps were introduced in LXMF (which was the first "testbed phase" for the in-RNS functionality for handling stuff like this).
Just curious, **(this is only a question)** after reading this at
https://github.com/wdunn001/beacon
'Crawl policy
Crawling a mesh is not crawling the web. Pages can sit behind LoRa links where the handshake costs more than the page it carries, and the person paying for that airtime did not ask to be indexed. Every limit below is enforced in code rather than by convention, and the environment variable is given so you can check what any given deployment is actually running.
Limit Default Variable
Pages held per node 20 BEACON_MAX_PAGES_PER_NODE
Link depth from a node's index page 2 BEACON_MAX_DEPTH
Delay between page fetches 5s BEACON_FETCH_DELAY
Re-crawl interval, per url 24h BEACON_RECRAWL_HOURS
Pages fetched over one Link up to 8 BEACON_NODE_BATCH
Worker threads 1 BEACON_CRAWL_WORKERS
'
for sites serving pages:
Could they render a page address hash that indicates when changed
that the page content has changed,
so that if page content has not changed
the content should not be scraped ?
Multiple (5, or several ?) queries from a Node to re-read alraady
stable pages could trigger a 24hour (or more!) block ban
and a banning announcement to alert everyone else
that there is a source begging to be banned.
( **This is a question, not a suggestion.**
The fundamental problem presents itself as a shield-vs-sword struggle.
Perhaps I misunderstood what can and cannot be done.
Any legitimate search engine would operate with a single identifier.
Any "search engine" trying to hide behind mutating identifiers
has obviously malevolent intentions and could be denounced as such ?)
Cheers to all who are trying to help here.
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## Reply 77
**Rudi Mentaire** · Wed, Sep 2, 2026 12:40 AM
@joakim Thank you - I will look at your draft ASAP. I have been quite busy over the last two days and wanted to use a calmer moment for this. Not that you think I ignored or missed your post...
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## Reply 78
**holobrine** · Wed, Sep 2, 2026 1:36 AM
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, couldn't the standard RNS routing table basically be used for search, locally? If not, I think it would be a good idea if nodes could publicize their public endpoints in their announces. Think of it like inverting the search paradigm from pulling (via scrapes), to pushing (via announces). Then it would be a small amount of additional load within the existing announces, instead of tons of scraping. Additionally, every node can choose which endpoints to publish, which seems like a win. This way, the routing table can additionally store public endpoints, and that can be locally searched with no additional network traffic. To assist with content lookup, perhaps announces could also be supplemented with content blurbs, such that a local search process could match queries to blurbs.
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## Reply 79
**Anonymous** · Wed, Sep 2, 2026 1:42 AM
**holobrine** wrote:
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, couldn't the standard RNS routing table basically be used for search, locally? If not, I think it would be a good idea if nodes could publicize their public endpoints in their announces. Think of it like inverting the search paradigm from pulling (via scrapes), to pushing (via announces). Then it would be a small amount of additional load within the existing announces, instead of tons of scraping. Additionally, every node can choose which endpoints to publish, which seems like a win. This way, the routing table can additionally store public endpoints, and that can be locally searched with no additional network traffic. Granted, this would only allow destination lookups rather than content lookups, but hey, it's a start of a solution at least.
See "announces" tab for Nomad Network in MeshChatX, or other similar clients.
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## Reply 80
**Anonymous** · Wed, Sep 2, 2026 1:54 AM
**holobrine** wrote:
> To assist with content lookup, perhaps announces could also be supplemented with content blurbs, such that a local search process could match queries to blurbs.
Announces are (seemingly) intentionally lightweight to support bandwidth-limited interfaces (like that found with lora). Additional data will only slow announce propogation across low-bandwidth networks. I believe optional application data is limited to ~280 bytes?
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## Reply 81
**Socrates** · Wed, Sep 2, 2026 11:18 AM
What if the real solution is breaking up the world nomadnet into disjoint, smaller, flatter, more "gated" networks instead of everything is 1 big WWW-connected "test-net" with everyone on it. also a solution to the "welcome to my test page" spam which makes "search" "useful" in the first place. maybe it's the same solution.
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## Reply 82
**Anonymous** · Wed, Sep 2, 2026 11:44 AM
**Eric-the-Read** wrote:
> **Mark** wrote:
> > There is a good way of solving it, and I have been working on it for a long time. But details matter, so I'm taking as long as is needed thinking it over and prototyping different implementation variants. It's been in the works since stamps were introduced in LXMF (which was the first "testbed phase" for the in-RNS functionality for handling stuff like this).
>
> Just curious, **(this is only a question)** after reading this at
> https://github.com/wdunn001/beacon
>
> 'Crawl policy
> Crawling a mesh is not crawling the web. Pages can sit behind LoRa links where the handshake costs more than the page it carries, and the person paying for that airtime did not ask to be indexed. Every limit below is enforced in code rather than by convention, and the environment variable is given so you can check what any given deployment is actually running.
>
> Limit Default Variable
> Pages held per node 20 BEACON_MAX_PAGES_PER_NODE
> Link depth from a node's index page 2 BEACON_MAX_DEPTH
> Delay between page fetches 5s BEACON_FETCH_DELAY
> Re-crawl interval, per url 24h BEACON_RECRAWL_HOURS
> Pages fetched over one Link up to 8 BEACON_NODE_BATCH
> Worker threads 1 BEACON_CRAWL_WORKERS
> '
>
> for sites serving pages:
> Could they render a page address hash that indicates when changed
> that the page content has changed,
> so that if page content has not changed
> the content should not be scraped ?
> Multiple (5, or several ?) queries from a Node to re-read alraady
> stable pages could trigger a 24hour (or more!) block ban
> and a banning announcement to alert everyone else
> that there is a source begging to be banned.
>
> ( **This is a question, not a suggestion.**
> The fundamental problem presents itself as a shield-vs-sword struggle.
> Perhaps I misunderstood what can and cannot be done.
> Any legitimate search engine would operate with a single identifier.
> Any "search engine" trying to hide behind mutating identifiers
> has obviously malevolent intentions and could be denounced as such ?)
>
> Cheers to all who are trying to help here.
this is a great question I have considered this beacon however at the moment trusts the node to describe itself. On the open web we would allow the page to provide a sitemap. This is currently not a feature I have fully developed yet.
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## Reply 83
**Eric-the-Read** · Thu, Sep 3, 2026 4:36 AM
**Anonymous** wrote:
>
>
> I realize now I didn't mention how it describes itself. and a hash is actually an excellent key for exactly that as it can character the compressed map as well the same way a jwt carries data why also being the check for change token you describe. This would be part of https://github.com/wdunn001/meshdata
What I hesitated to write was that the hash
could be as simple as a unix-timestamp affixed to the end of the page-name.
That unix-timestamp could be encoded as BASE-62,
eliminating the overhead of hashing the entire file.
Whenever the page is edited/updated,
just encode the time in BASE62 and replaced the old tag with the new one.
done
(if the content remains the same
then there is no need to update the tag)
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## Reply 84
**QandA** · Thu, Sep 3, 2026 5:40 AM
correct me if i'm wrong, but if roogle or someone else is using the i2p interface, then can't they just still anonymously crawl and index the network how ever they want to?
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## Reply 85
**QandA** · Thu, Sep 3, 2026 5:43 AM
if someone is using the i2p interface and they are anonymous through i2p, then how can someone stop them from crawling, indexing and congesting the network?
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## Reply 86
**makingandbaking** · Thu, Sep 3, 2026 6:01 AM
i am QandA, just made an account here
another question, how would you stop a person if they are hosting their reticulum search engine website on i2p as a hidden service? what i am saying is, if someone wants to crawl the entire network. and they don't make themselves known online, then the only think you can do is block their identity. i can't think of anything else.
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## Reply 87
**Necom** · Thu, Sep 3, 2026 8:09 AM
I2P would not make difference. Well without I2P I suppose it might be possible for the transport node to just manually block whatever IP address the crawler is connecting from, so they can't access the network at all. But even with I2P I think it should still be possible to automatically detect any spamming node and block it. Like I2P might not have a consistent form of identification that is the same everytime the node connects, but if you just block any sub-interface spamming link requests with a hopcount of 0 then the node will still be blocked upon reconnecting as it would continue spamming and be detected again. I mean you don't really have to limit it to nodes where all the spam has a hopcount of 0, even if it's above 0 (meaning the node is either a transport node transporting spam from another node, or a malicious node trying to pretend to not be the source) you could still block it and argue that it also has a responsibility to block spamming nodes, and that if it doesn't do that then you have to.
And this is all even without mentioning the fact that whether or not you use an IP or I2P interface every packet will include your transport identity. I suppose you can generate a new transport identity every time you reconnect, but like I said you can automatically detect a spamming node and block it. These are just way’s for the transport node to block a crawler though, a better solution for a situation like this would be the rngit node using either some kind of PoW stamp solution where every request has to include a stamp that needs some processing power to calculate, possibly slowing down the crawler and making it more expensive to send so many requests as it would need more electricity, or just blocking the crawlers identity. You could perhaps have a system combing stamps with identities where you only require stamps if multiple links identify with the same identity, and the more simultaneous links with the same identity, the harder the stamps would be to calculate, meaning the more you spam the more processing power you would need for each stamp. That’s specifically for a crawler that doesn’t reuse links though, if it does you could just require stamps if they reach a certain number of requests per second.
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## Reply 88
**Zenith** · Thu, Sep 3, 2026 8:18 AM
There is already a solution and it's the same mechanism used in LXMF for stamps, but applied on the `Destination` and `Identity` level.
**Necom** wrote:
> And this is all even without mentioning the fact that whether or not you use an IP or I2P interface every packet will include your transport identity. I suppose you can generate a new transport identity every time you reconnect
Transport identities are ephemeral, they no longer persist. Unless you explicitly set `static_transport_identity = yes`
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