For the past 2-3 weeks, the web server has been struggling under punishing load from crawlers scraping the site for content. Seems everyone needs to train their LLM, and don't care if doing so takes down little indy websites.
Its a fair statement that some of the services are not very efficient. The App Catalog reads giant monolothic JSON files that were scraped from HP's servers a decade and a half ago -- and those get loaded every time someone visits a page. Could that be re-engineered to use an in-memory cache for speed? Absolutely. Do I have time to do that? Absolutely not.
Putting CloudFlare in front of the server keeps the bots at bay, but breaks the server-side detection that downgrades the security and web experience for vintage webOS devices. Working around requires re-designing many shared services, and completely re-architecting the call stack for others. To keep some services working, like MeTube or Reddit, they get proxied through a computer at my house where normal human traffic gets mixed in with proxy behavior and helps avoid getting black-listed. This link is also broken by CloudFlare.
The long and short is that I just don't have time to play cat-and-mouse with giant tech companies intent on eating the whole internet to feed their upside-down AI strategy. As of today, some of the key services are mostly working. App Museum, Docs and the SDK work on both modern and legacy clients. Check Mate -- my productivity app that I use on everything from webOS to iPhone to modern Mac, is partially restored. MeTube and Reddit are down, and I don't know how to fix them.
What does work will only continue working until Nov 11, 2025 when the certbot certs expire -- CloudFlare also blocks that renewal. Before that time, I will try to come up with long-term solution for the web properties and the App Museum. Everything else will need to find a new home, or will be shut down.
I started this restoration effort in 2018, and had hoped to keep the platform useful until 2028. Unfortunately, it looks like 2025 is as long as I can manage. If you're still using webOS, please begin preparing for our second sunset. I've done all I can…
