>That works sometimes, but they will pretty often spoof it or start spoofing it.

They already are spoofing to a degree, but they fuck up and will use a referrer from the wrong site sometimes and I'll see referrer from nitter.poast.org or one of the other instances, and this isn't how nitter operates. I just think banning isn't a viable strategy at this point, I've banned about 120k IP today and the botnet doesn't seem to have slowed a bit. I've been dealing with this guy since August and have managed to get him to fuck off multiple times, but this time he seems hellbent on scraping my instance until the instance no longer functions.