@SilverDeth Ha, maybe they just noticed FediList. The crawler identifies itself pretty clearly but until they started including ActivityPub by default, it was just a handful of WordPress instances. When the Wordpocalypse happened and Wordpress ate fedi, suddenly FediList was sending off, like, one cycle per hour under ideal circumstances and 3 requests per cycle, so 12k reqs/hour on their managed-hosting instances, not counting attempts to fetch WordPress instances that still resolve but that no longer exist (though resurrections are rarely attempted if it's been dead for more than a week; it tops out at once a month). A bot that does a trickle, people don't notice, this would be maybe

Here's the visualization of the Wordpocalypse; it's just the cumulative total of Wordpress instances, including the ones that went down, just a count over time of how many Wordpress instances Fedilist noticed. Huge jump in the fall of 2023, and it basically continues until summer 2024, at which point it calms way down (probably the switch got flipped on the same day for all of them and they just took a few months to federate) and the increase is probably just the rate at which Wordpress blogs are created multiplied by the likelihood that they federate (which we don't know but can probably figure out). (The big gap is :brucecampbell::callmesnake:. I fudged the numbers by skipping two days: the first day in FediList's data, and the day it came back after being down since early December, so the totals are off by about 1k.) The other graph is just the rate of increase, so you can see when there were big rollouts.
wordpocalypse-rate.png
wordpocalypse.png
wordpocalypse.tsv