<p>Recently,Cloudflarehaslaunchedaclumsy,poorly-executedattempttocentralizethefediverseontheirplatformknownasWildebeest.Thereare<ahref="https://blog.cloudflare.com/welcome-to-wildebeest-the-fediverse-on-cloudflare/"title="This one's kind of a joke, but it explains in detail just how much Wildebeest is fundamentally dependent on Cloudflare's platform, and if you agree with me about anything you should already know why that's bad.">a</a><ahref="https://stop.voring.me/notes/9bka8dyjjo"title="Gleason, of getting-kicked-off-the-dev-team-for-the-fedi-server-he-created-for-sucking-so-much fame, is now contributing code to Wildebeest.">few</a><ahref="https://glitterkitten.co.uk/@doot/109910496299181873"title="This one's the most important. Wildebeest literally just publically displays messages marked as direct. Think admins being able to read your "direct messages" was bad? Try everyone.">reasons</a>nottowanttouseit,andyouprobablydon'twanttobefederatingwithiteither.However,blockingeveryinstancerunningitonsightwouldbebothtediousandineffective.</p>
<p>ThewayI've chosen to deal with this is to just configure my reverse proxy, Nginx, to deny connections from anything with "wildebeest" in the user agent string. There are several other good reasons to do this, such as blocking bots that ignore robots.txt, or adapting this approach to serve specialized pages to old browsers, or just denying access to anything that isn'tChromeifyouwanttoearnyourplaceinthe9thcircleofHell.</p>
<p>I'm assuming here that you already know the basics of configuring Nginx, otherwise this article won'treallybeofmuchusetoyou.</p>