Blocking AI Crawlers on your Mastodon Server, Nginx Edition

There are few things worse than getting an alert notification from a server at night. Your mind races—is my redundancy working, should I grab a fire extinguisher—knowing that the glaring light of your SSH session in bed will wake your spouse. Then you&rsquo;ll have two problems. Such an event found me the other day, for of all things, my single no-frills instance that runs my Mastodon server. This…