Instances that are not trying to attract a new audience might want to turn on the new Private Instance setting, which makes everything private. The home page, posts, communities, etc will all require a login to view. Bots and scrapers won't be able to get anything useful from your instance and will stop trying.
Also if a single-user instance is subscribed to mostly NSFW communities, maybe they don't want everyone to be able to see which communities are listed at /communities.
Or it could be used temporarily when a biiig flood of scrapers turn up, then turn it back off when they go away.
Edit: Federation is unaffected by this. For logged-in users everything continues as before.
Fucking AI has destroyed the free internet. And for what? All to grift a bunch of investors.
Scrapers have been a problem for a lot longer than LLMs have been an issue. Fighting them has always been a pain in the proverbials, but theres been some entertaining work recently on deliberately getting them lost in a maze of made up pages. The problem is that they never stop or go away. They'll just keep trying, and new ones keep springing up.