This is a cute idea, but I wonder what is the sustainable solution to this emerging fundamental problem: As content publishers, we want our content to be accessible to everyone, and we're even willing to pay for server costs relative to our intended audience -- but a new outsized flood of scrapers was not part of the cost calculation, and that is messing up the plan.

It seems all options have major trade-offs. We can host on big social media and lose all that control and independence. We can pay for outsized infrastructure just to feed the scrapers, but the cost may actually be prohibitive, and seems such a waste to begin with. We can move as much as possible SSG and put it all behind cloudflare, but this comes with vendor lock in and just isn't architecturally feasible in many applications. We can do real "verified identities" for bots, and just let through the ones we know and like, but this only perpetuates corporate control and makes healthy upstart competition (like Kagi) much more difficult.

So, what are we to do?