DaEagleLemmy.world is down because of a DDOS attack
LilDumpySomeone is really out to get lemmy.world lately.
I feel like with every update there is at least one attack.
maybe that dude with the mass random communities name
đđ§đ§đWasnât that the person that hacked a few instances a week or two ago? @[email protected]
Oh ya, I forgot about that guy. What even is the point of doing that?
Someone is really out to get lemmy.world lately.
I feel like with every update there is at least one attack.
Weâre having fun and trying to build a positive space. And we have real potential to succeed in growing large. Can you think of a single faster way to attract trolling on the internet?
Itâs a lot more likely than someone like spez taking a break from plundering his company to piss off a modest number of internet randos in some internet corner somewhere, which would barely be a drop in the bucket of his problem anyway.
The overall effect of this is so small, it almost has to be someone(s) with too much time on their hands. If they had any kind of real power, they wouldnât be wasting their time on these chump change attacks.
Maybe it was their refusal to take a stance on Meta and Threads? The admins of .ml said it took them 2 minutes to decide to preemptively defederate. .World on the other hand came to an anti-corporate platform and publicly took a position that they would wait and see about federation with Meta.
Itâs like saying âpower to the people and viva revolution but we are also remaining open to licking boot depending on the circumstances.â
I do not believe that the Fediverse is an exclusively anti-corporate platform. Itâs nature is open to all, even corporations, at a technical level.
Granted, many anti-corporate people came here, but that doesnât make this a fundamently anti-corporate place. Just their specific communities.
I also doubt many serious Fediverse types are that petty and childish. Thatâs generally a trait of more short-sighted people. Not a lot of native trolls here, we came here in many cases to escape that behavior.
Is it so strange to think some assholes might just chase us down and bring it to us? What would you do if you were a hate-fueled asshole that wanted to watch the world burn? Iâd find nice things and fuck them up, personally. That would be both fun and potentially effective.
The FOSS alternative to the big corporate controlled social media corps that swallow up smaller social media alternatives is not anti-corporate? Ok.
Hot SaucermanYou must be new here. Linux runs on 90% of corporate servers. AWS runs its own version of Linux.
This means, by and large, the labor done on a volunteer basis by random internet nerds to create Linux and all its tools has unintentionally been the largest transfer of wealth created by labor from the working class to the corporate class in fucking history.
FOSS means anyone can use it for any reason. Including organizations you reasonably fucking hate using it for reasons you fucking hate.
Itâs literally why in the last few years you had maintainers of open source projects sabotaging their own projects when learning what it is being used for, or trying to make ânew rulesâ that donât allow certain organizations to use their code (pro-tip, if they can access your code, they can use it).
Only now is the FOSS community waking up to the fact that corporations are using their open ideals to profit off of their labor very handsomely.
Anony MooseDepressing, but I canât disagree.
Fully agree with all of that. The difference I see with ActivityPub is that we can say they can use it all they want but we wonât be connecting with them or interacting with their users at all.
And they honestly probably wonât care, but it makes it clear where the rest of us stand and communicates to current Fediverse users a commitment to stay as free as possible from corporate influence. I felt like there was no room for milquetoast answers to that question.
KabeThe whole point of lemmy.world is that itâs a general, welcome-to-all instance.
If you want server admins who take overtly political stances and actions on behalf of their users, you need only look elsewhere.
I literally left Lemmy.world and stopped recurring donations to switch to Lemmy.ml
But youâre muddying the waters with a disingenuous argument. They can be open to all individual users without being open to connection with possibly the worst actor in the social media space.
Youâre also mischaracterizing staying free of giant corporate influence as âtaking overtly political actions blah blah on behalf of its usersâ and starting to sound 100% like a corporate shill with absolutely dogshit arguments that only a moron wouldnât see through.
Who is worse, Meta or the people who want nothing to do with Meta?
The answer to that is extremely easy.
Protecting their users from bad actors is exactly what server admins should be doing as good admins. Thatâs not political, and go lick boot somewhere else.
Sounds like you made the right choice for yourself - good for you.
Thank you and you too. I apologize that I didnât make my point more civilly. Iâm an old-ass techie that has seen enshitification ruin just about every new frontier and being noncommittal about keeping them out while we have a chance is, to me, a surefire recipe to have big capital ruin this little experiment in freedom. I think that you just have to study Metaâs history to assure yourself that their intentions are always self-serving and never in the public interest. My incivility is purely because of how strongly I loathe them, not you. Take care.
ReclipseYou seem nice
I genuinely am. Part of why I hate Meta, Reddit, and Twitter is how callously they treat their users. The reason that I have very little patience for people that stick up for them is that I donât like bullies or the enabling of bullies. Go take a look at the app permissions required to use Threads and tell me that any âniceâ person would think itâs ok to harvest that much data. We are livestock to them.
They explained the situation very well, and itâs not exactly as you described it.
Thread is outside the fediverse now, so there is literally nothing to defederate.
And they already basically admitted that in case of threads federating, they would defederate.
It was one of the few instances (if not the only one) to put down exactly what practical problems federating would cause instead of simply taking an ethical stance or regurgitating the usual nonsense EEE argument.
But people wanted an immediate, strong and ethical stance (which is also understandable), so they didnât like the wait and they didnât care about an objective analysis of pro and cons
Yeah, to quote the Joker here âitâs about sending a message.â Doesnât matter about the technical reality, it just wouldâve determined the wording. âIf they try to federate with us, we wonât have any of it.â
I didnât see them say that though, saw a Mastodon post and an admin thread on .world that specifically said they would wait and see.
Yeah, but the admin clarified in some replies that the moderation problems and possibility of receiving ads are already enough to choose to defederate. They didnât give the absolute certainty but basically made their intentions clear.
But I agree with you, most people wanted to get a clear message against it and not just a âif that happens we will very likely defederateâ.
I still think both approaches are fine, itâs good to decide by ethics and itâs good to wait and decide by rationality too. No wrong choices, itâs just a matter of preference
sabHonestly, decentralized social media are probably bad news for the current state of the art of disinformation campaigns. The bullshit that has been thriving on Facebook and Twitter is not only a chorus of bigoted aunts and uncles, but (perhaps more importantly) a coordinated attack from state sponsored troll farms seeking, among other things, to destabilise Western democracies.
The fediverse is, by design, less vulnerable to these attacks. Your trolls can generate activity around your disinformation content all they want: if nobody I follow boosts it, it's not going to show up in my Mastodon feed. And you can feel free to recreate r/conservative or whatever in the fediverse, but if it becomes a cesspool like on Reddit you'll be stuck with your trolls talking to each other on a defederated instance with no-one listening.
It is probably paranoid to think there's any geopolitical actor behind the current attack, but I fully expect the fediverse to become under attack from Russian troll farms as soon as they realize they're no longer reaching out to people on Twitter, Reddit or Facebook.
I agree with this entirely.
a coordinated attack from state sponsored troll farms seeking, among other things, to destabilise Western democracies
If you donât think state sponsored troll farms exist in the West, Iâve got a bridge to sell you.
From 2011:
theguardian.com/âŚ/us-spy-operation-social-networkâŚ
From 2014:
You'll notice I only mentioned Russia once, and not even in the paragraph you cited. The Russian troll farms are without doubt the most famous, and they have backed candidates like Farage, Trump and Le Pen with uncanny success. But it would be incredibly naive to think other actors are not involved with similar strategies, which is why I kept my post general. Steve Bannon has his ties to Russia, but he's American as apple pie.
The US government as a whole, comparatively, are the good guys in this. The US government is pretty cautious and tends to shy away from spreading propaganda to its own people.
There are a lot of caveats there, absolutely. Iâll get into some of those. But letâs not pretend the US government is on par with the Russian or Chinese governments when it comes to social media propaganda.
The GOP being in bed with the Russians and collaboratively pushing narratives is not being done on behalf of the government. And I doubt whatever is happening at Elgin is targeting Americans.
And I doubt whatever is happening at Elgin is targeting Americans.
I donât think ânot targeting their own citizensâ is quite the flex you think it is.
Bootlicker
You listed a few interesting things and seemed to not mention one that seems to be something you would have if you knew.
I might be a bit wrong in what Iâm about to say, but the basics are right. Meta released a chatGPT like LLMs source code and had their weights leaked. Their model is named LLaMA.
People have been messing around with LLaMA inspired LLMs on their personal computers thanks to meta for months now.
Bad actor LLM bots are now a hobbyist level task. The fediverse is showing signs of not significantly caring or trying. Imo, Lemmy instances arenât ready for this.
White hat attackers maybe?
White hat attackers do not take down infrastructure, that is by definition a black hat act. White hat attackers would merely discover exploits and report them to owners.
arcturusitâs one of the biggest instances, not really surprising that bad actors are targeting it
TheInsane42Drat, someone really doesnât like lemmy.world and how active it became.
OverzeetopBig target. Either that or the butt wipe that was denied his Reddit username and started creating random long manned communities.
I just sort of assumed weâd all get accounts in 2-3 instances so if one goes down we can still participate elsewhere.
mysoulishomeLogged on from Lemmy.world through voyager to see if this comment postsâŚ
Ya. Iâm still logged in through the Liftoff app and able to post. Idk why my first comment on this post was duplicated though.
Courbet_eiroI have also had problems with my lemmy.ml account. Maybe the same attack??
ă´ăłĺ¤ŞI wonder who is behind this and whatâs the intention.
LoafyLemonSpeznaz, probably. ( ͥ° ÍĘ ÍĄÂ°)
RxBradNo doubt Threads-relatedâŚ
Quite a few people on here really go off-the-rails when it comes to .world not coming out and outright blocking it before itâs a thing. (while also forgetting it affecta Mastodon, and not-so-much Lemmy)
JarmerAlso the other instance I was using ... vlemmy.net ... has been down for like a week now. I wonder if it's completely done for?
Definitely dead according to some of the other posts Iâve seen
Do you know what happened to it? Just curious.
trouser_mouseThe server was torn to shreds by raccoons. Thatâs what I heard.
To shreds, you say?
Howâs its admin holding up?
To shreds, you say?
mutanti bet a lot of people regret torching their reddit accounts lmfao
czechI knew which user this was immediately after reading the comment. Check out their post history, all they do is shit on the fediverse. Why are you here if its to terrible? Hmmm....
Just once, when I saw a post here linking to a Reddit post with all the backlash from ending awards.
I wanted to tell them all to abandon the sinking shithole of a ship that is Reddit and come to the Fediverse. Wasnât worth making an account over though, theyâll figure it out.
Wow. Yeah, I regret reading your history as suggested by @czech. I'm really sorry for whatever is making you such a miserable person. It just be awful. I sincerely hope things get better for you.
ArotriosLooks like lemmy.world is back up. vlemmy.net is still down.
vlemmy.net has been down for a week or two at this point and the admins took down their donation links. I think itâs safe to say theyâre not coming back.
This is a shame. Hosting a high visibility server is no joke, and I donât envy the admins and the very difficult work they do. Itâs simultaneously an argument for and against decentralization. For - a single instance can get knocked out without talking out the whole fediverse. Against - it seems as though high visibility communities are potentially fairly easy to target and take down.
I think that decentralization wins out here in the end, but it does feel like there may be a need for some sort of fallback mechanism to be in place at an instance level. I suspect this might evolve somehow over time. It would require some way to expand trust between instances and or portability of communities (which could be fraught with user trust/data integrity issues).
If things donât evolve it could grow into a whack-a-mole game for bad actors, or there might need to be more investment into server infrastructure (which could work against decentralization if only because of economies of scale).
Or maybe thereâs no issue after all? Iâm just imagining potential implications of a scaling fediverse - itâs fascinating and exciting stuff!
Thoughts?
You donât need to necessarily centralize to defend against DDos or similar attacks. You can add things like Cloudflare for DDos mitigations, caching and maybe something like Kubernetes for horizontal scaling of servers (spin up more servers to handle extended load) transparently behind the scenes. This can also get you the benefits of low geographical latency, so a load-balancer fetches you data from the closest replica of a database geographically, etc.
Of course, all this adds up in terms of cost, but I think this might be worth it for the largest instances. I suppose that can still be considered centralization.
If we wanted to encourage small many small instances instead, perhaps there could be a transparent load-balancer layer for the fediverse that instances could sign up for, that is managed by a devops group. Alternatively, lemmy could have built-in load-balancing, caching, etc. as part of its codebase that instance operators can set up with their own accounts at Cloudflare, etc.
Agreed. Ultimately, thatâs the point. There are solutions (with ongoing vigilance required) but it comes with an ongoing cost, be it server infrastructure or human resources).
I think the federated load balancer might be interesting but I expect there are many pitfalls that need to be considered and addressed wrt security, trust and integrity of data.
Anyway, itâs amazing to see this all grow and evolve.
Definitely, very exciting times!
db0This is the primary reason why Iâm ok for my instance to not grow massively. We got 10K people and we have pretty good traffic ,without overloading us or making too much of a target. We still get new users since we allow registrations, but the application requirements retain the quality
Absolutely makes sense. If lemmy is going to have any truly large communities though, investment in infrastructure/ops as well as function/moderation will be absolutely needed. (Itâs an âifâ, of course)
Time will tell how the community will want to lead it.