Going into debt is a trap, you are right to be wary. I'm raised to never spend more than I have, I have seen what it can do. When you lend money, you are now on a moving treadmill, and this treadmill wouldn't care to slow down if you can't keep up, it'll eat you alive once you reach the end of the belt.
Ouch, that's just so annoying. Maybe some sort of human challenge for anyone that's not authenticated whenever the server load is high could help?...
Edit: unless the scraping is coming from the ActivityPub protocol as a bunch of instances trying to federate (or something? I'm still not familiar with how it all works, besides the payloads looking like a bunch of .json), in which case, my suggestion probably wouldn't apply all that well.
Going into debt is a trap, you are right to be wary. I'm raised to never spend more than I have, I have seen what it can do. When you lend money, you are now on a moving treadmill, and this treadmill wouldn't care to slow down if you can't keep up, it'll eat you alive once you reach the end of the belt.