The correct thing to do here is put a caching layer in front so that every feed reader isn't simultaneously hitting the origin for the same content. IP banning is the wrong approach. (Even if it's only a temporary block, that's going to cause my reader to show an error and is entirely unnecessary.)
Why did you view the XML file directly?
There are many reasons why I do personally this.
1- Check that the link actually loads and works!
2- See how much content and does it contain last n or all feed history by default
3- To see if the feed gives summary or full content of posts
4- Just for curiosity like in this case I wanted to see what is this feed that prompted a blog post that reached HN front page.
It is usually a superposition state of those reasons. But this is why it is aggressive limit and I know it her server her rulee but this wasn't pleasant experience for me as an end user. I was just sharing my experience.
That's certainly a bit more effort to implement, though, and the author night not think it's worth the time.
NixOS defaults to refresh frequency of every 5 minutes[0] (0_0).
I had noticed some blogs blackholing me before, but never quite made the connection.
So now it is configured to fetch every 12 hours. I believe that is fair.
[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/d70bd19e0a38ad4790d391...