You know, at this point I should just make the “birthday” of Catbox April 14th.

We weathered a lot this year! From getting deplatformed from Patreon, the primary source of funding, to running out of Storage while I was in Japan for 2 weeks, then to AI slop bots uploading 200+ GB of slop per day, there was a lot to handle! The good news is that’s all behind us! I would like to touch on the AI slop bot stuff for a second though (skip to the big text below to avoid my rant):

Catbox has been running for 11 years now, and for 9 of those years, growth was pretty linear. Traffic goes up, storage used goes up, support goes up. This is the “organic” nature of Catbox. For the last 2 years, amplifying in the last 6 months, both storage used has gone up significantly compared to traffic and support. I first investigated this last year around May, as it was starting to put pressure on the storage space available to Catbox. I was able to find that most of the storage used was from a handful (35 or so) IP addresses that were uploading over 500 GB of content to Catbox in very short spans of time anonymously. After purging those uploads and banning those IP addresses, things seemed to be fine, however later last year, around September, disk consumption began to increase exponentially again compared to traffic. Doing what I could to mitigate it at that time involved Project Lain, as well as light monitoring of high usage IP addresses, like before. However this time there was no “super users” that were eating up storage. I let it be for a bit while purging a couple that I could. This problem increased even more in the last 60 days, to the point where I was burning through around 200-300 GB per day. Review of upload data shows hundreds of datacenter and proxy service IP addresses uploading 10-20 GB each for a few days, then dropping off. Looking at the files, it’s various “slop” content, including:

Low resolution AI generated porn
Tiktok Videos from the Middle East and SEA
Clearly scraped LinkedIn/publicly available photos
blob files containing junk data

Clearly this is not the “organic” traffic I mentioned earlier, and since the IP addresses are so varied, it’s clear something is happening here. I was alerted by someone that Claude will use Catbox in its coding projects as a “dumping ground” of sorts for when it needs to redirect content. This is clearly an abuse of the service, and stops today. Effective immediately, anonymous uploads from datacenter and public proxy IP addresses has been restricted. It’s unfortunate that I had to do this, but its clear that, from a “public service” perspective, I need to have some sense of self preservation. I don’t want to kill third party tools that use the API, but the changing landscape of the internet is forcing my hand.

Anyway, rant over! Here’s some cool statistics for you guys:

Storage used on Catbox Prime: 217 TB
Storage offloaded to Lain: 55 TB
Total Storage used: 272 TB
Average bandwidth utilization: 5.9 Gbps
Total bandwidth used last year (approx.): 19 PB (petabytes)

And here’s a wonderful art piece by Pettankon!

Thank you all again for your continued support, especially all of you that came to support me after Patreon kicked me in the face. I’m sure there were a lot of you that weren’t even aware of Catbox, but the public rally behind Catbox was huge! Thank you all again, and here’s to another year!