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by timpera 25 days ago
Anubis often takes more than 60 seconds to complete on low-end devices (especially old smartphones). It seems like there's no good solution.
4 comments

But after you’ve completed the Anubis PoW challenge for a site, it remains valid for some amount of time.

So it’s not quite as horrible as it sounds.

I have setting up Anubis for my own sites on my todo list. And I wish more people did it too. I don’t really mind waiting a little bit extra every now and then before the page loads. What I do mind is ReCaptcha asking me to click all the pictures with buses in them etc. And especially when I have to do it several times over before it’s happy. I’d rather wait a minute for a page to load than to ever solve a ReCaptcha again, if given the choice.

> So it’s not quite as horrible as it sounds.

I don't know about you, but if a random webpage takes 60+ seconds to load, I just close it and choose to never interact with that site again (unless it's my bank, which is a real and annoying occurrence).

There's not an easy, perfect solution, for sure. Newer phones get faster, but spammer compute gets cheaper.

Some sort of decentralized trust web seems like another option, though less viable.

One of unexpected outcomes from AI-induced hardware shortage may be that, in fact, compute won’t be getting cheaper and may in fact get more expensive…
That must be really low end then. I’ve never seen it complete in a timeframe that was slower than “I can’t even read the page before it redirects”
My guess is its an implementation error, not an hardware limitation. I have two 10-year-old devices and one passes instantaneously while the other halts for a good half minute every time.
It also requires JavaScript. I like to have JS off by default since running code on my machine is a privilege—one that I opt into, not the the site owner’s choice. This is frustrating since these blockers don’t let me know if the site is trustworthy first before needing to solve a Sudoku for Cloudflare or calculating useless hashes for Anubis.