Sometimes, often even, Dreamwidth can do the right thing like this. I fully support them in this fight and hope they win. But let's not pretend banning huge IP ranges for years at a time is new to them.
Dreamwidth has been at the forefront of banning large swaths of the internet. They started doing it years before anyone else. Before the for-profit corporate spidering of HTTP/S content even began causing issues. This is well trod territory and entirely familiar for them and their upstream network provider they like to blame their inability to fix it on.
Nah, not cloudflare. Just their upstream network provider (or so they say in support emails) and Dreamwidth's well established and long running practice of not caring that huge ranges of IPv4 are blocked from viewing any sites hosted on them. They do control the blocks but they have their tech support lie about it; as evidenced by this fine grain and specific blocking they're doing now re: Mississippi.
Dreamwidth has been at the forefront of banning large swaths of the internet. They started doing it years before anyone else. Before the for-profit corporate spidering of HTTP/S content even began causing issues. This is well trod territory and entirely familiar for them and their upstream network provider they like to blame their inability to fix it on.