Lemmy World outages

lwadmin@lemmy.worldmod to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 3636 points –

Hello there!

It has been a while since our last update, but it's about time to address the elephant in the room: downtimes. Lemmy.World has been having multiple downtimes a day for quite a while now. And we want to take the time to address some of the concerns and misconceptions that have been spread in chatrooms, memes and various comments in Lemmy communities.

So let's go over some of these misconceptions together.

"Lemmy.World is too big and that is bad for the fediverse".

While one thing is true, we are the biggest Lemmy instance, we are far from the biggest in the Fediverse. If you want actual numbers you can have a look here: https://fedidb.org/network

The entire Lemmy fediverse is still in its infancy and even though we don't like to compare ourselves to Reddit it gives you something comparable. The entire amount of Lemmy users on all instances combined is currently 444,876 which is still nothing compared to a medium sized subreddit. There are some points that can be made that it is better to spread the load of users and communities across other instances, but let us make it clear that this is not a technical problem.

And even in a decentralised system, there will always be bigger and smaller blocks within; such would be the nature of any platform looking to be shaped by its members. 

"Lemmy.World should close down registrations"

Lemmy.World is being linked in a number of Reddit subreddits and in Lemmy apps. Imagine if new users land here and they have no way to sign up. We have to assume that most new users have no information on how the Fediverse works and making them read a full page of what's what would scare a lot of those people off. They probably wouldn't even take the time to read why registrations would be closed, move on and not join the Fediverse at all. What we want to do, however, is inform the users before they sign up, without closing registrations. The option is already built into Lemmy but only available on Lemmy.ml - so a ticket was created with the development team to make these available to other instance Admins. Here is the post on Lemmy Github.

Which brings us to the third point:

"Lemmy.World can not handle the load, that's why the server is down all the time"

This is simply not true. There are no financial issues to upgrade the hardware, should that be required; but that is not the solution to this problem.

The problem is that for a couple of hours every day we are under a DDOS attack. It's a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where we close one attack vector and they'll start using another one. Without going too much into detail and expose too much, there are some very 'expensive' sql queries in Lemmy - actions or features that take up seconds instead of milliseconds to execute. And by by executing them by the thousand a minute you can overload the database server.

So who is attacking us? One thing that is clear is that those responsible of these attacks know the ins and outs of Lemmy. They know which database requests are the most taxing and they are always quick to find another as soon as we close one off. That's one of the only things we know for sure about our attackers. Being the biggest instance and having defederated with a couple of instances has made us a target.  

"Why do they need another sysop who works for free"

Everyone involved with LW works as a volunteer. The money that is donated goes to operational costs only - so hardware and infrastructure. And while we understand that working as a volunteer is not for everyone, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. As a volunteer you decide how much of your free time you are willing to spend on this project, a service that is also being provided for free.

We will leave this thread pinned locally for a while and we will try to reply to genuine questions or concerns as soon as we can.

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Have you guys contacted law enforcement? It may surprise you. A startup I worked for had the same issue and contacted the FBI. They were able to quickly (within hours) find the person doing it despite him using VPNs and other tools for OpSec.

I’d imagine that there are a lot of users and communities on here that want law enforcement as far away from the Fediverse as possible…

And yet, and this will shock and amaze you, they're probably here already. Lemmy isn't a secret.

No doubt, but there’s a difference between a van trundling down the street and a welcome mat and a tray of tea cooling in the living room.

I get you. There's good and bad in law enforcement, especially when it comes to tech and social media. On the one hand, there's pretty serious crime happening online that needs to be stopped. On the other, wild invasions of privacy. There's no easy answer at this point and governments obviously won't police themselves.

Illegal activity is actually easier to track on the Fediverse than close source websites. Easy to program bots to run through open source code looking for it.

Why get a warrant when you can honey pot the entire thing? A trick as old as time.

I assure you that the FBI knew of lemmy and had watchers here before we hit 5 digit user numbers

Knowing someone in the FBI and how they talk about how antiquated it is, I have to vehemently disagree with you there.

I hate to break the illusion but cybersecurity experts already know about every Fediverse instance and it gets scanned regularly. Just like they do discord, FB, twitter, etc.

Lemmy isn't a private space. It's less private than Reddit in many regards.

I don't see why when illegal things are happening the government's offered services shouldn't be made use of

The risk that would create for vulnerable communities on here would deeply irresponsible.

Right. Because FBI doesn't already monitor any suspicious activity.

Right. Because FBI doesn't already monitor any suspicious activity.

FTFY

They fuck with left leaning groups and try to intentionally destabilize them 🤷‍♂️

Fun fact: part of the goal of COINTELPRO is to make it so people accuse each other of being an agent provocateur

Other fun fact: another goal of it is to make it so people would accuse each other right back, completely destroying trust on all sides

Actually fun fact: this tactic is side agnostic and there are left wing plants under deep cover in right wing organizations from the fbi to the kkk specifically there to hinder their progress and damage their tactics

It's fascinating to me that there are people who deeply understand and can effectively apply techniques of sowing discord within and between groups and fanning the flames without also making themselves the obvious source of the strife. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

It's mostly right wing groups today. Left wing groups are just carebears these days.

I’m left. But what the fuck is the deal with “tankies” though? All of the sudden there are revolutionary communists (with no sense of the historical irony of this label) everywhere. I hadn’t even heard the term 6 months ago, it’s then all over Reddit, and suddenly I’m seeing people talk about violent revolution elsewhere on the lemmyfedi. I know part of it is the nature of the ‘verse, but is part of it that these people are the black box anarchists of yesteryear and I’m just behind the times?

They're extremely online and outjerking each other in a feedback loop, and the moment you see one, chances are that you're in a space where they're overrepresented.

I figured it was overrepresentation but wow. The last time I encountered people that militant was bb anarchists in college. It’s like that except they don’t care about flying under the radar.

I don't understand.

As I said above, The FBI is known to infiltrate left leaning political organizations to fuck with them.

Well ok but they're not going to do that because you asked them to investigate an attack.

Hi, 1974 called, they think your living in the wrong decade.

Sounds like you and lefty are concerned with protecting illegal activity here? Fuck that. I’m not okay with Lemmy being a hub for society’s most trash individuals.

I believe it's a mistake to conflate law-abiding with morally correct. In fact, in some cases the morally correct thing to do is disobey the law.

I (foolishly) assumed we were talking about the obviously morally abhorrent stuff.

When the world has people killing each other for the "obviously" morally abhorrent stuff like wearing the wrong clothes... I'm afraid you need to specify.

This isn’t 8chan, and I have no wish to see it emulate it. Revenge porn, CSAM, stalking and harassment: that absolutely should be kicked off and reported.

But if you can’t imagine a scenario where a left leaning, privacy focused userbase might look at willingly going to law enforcement without the above issues and balk, you need to review your history.

That's not what we were implying remotely. The FBI is known to infiltrate left leaning political organizations to fuck with them. Obviously if someones hosting violence or CP or shit like that that'd awful and they need to be arrested, but I was specifying specifically about the FBIs history with fucking up political groups and forums

I jumped the gun then with assuming it was the latter. My b.

Have you guys contacted law enforcement?

Given that the goal of this instance is to serve as a reference of the Fediverse, it is expected that it will continue to grow, and in turn, attract more attention, which due to a game of numbers also involves more trolls and enemies. Thus, the fact that the instance is being DDOS'ed right now shouldn't be seen as a conjunctural problem, but rather a challenge that is here to stay and sometimes be a problem.

While I think it's a good idea for lemmy.world to do it this time, relying on a police force to routinely come to our call and do something means periods during which the instance will be out while we wait for them for work. The instance, and Lemmy in general, should have more robust defenses so that calling for external help is only required at exceptional times.

Did it result in charges for the person doing it?

For this, I want to see the motivation for DDOSing Lemmy lol.

There was a user who made hundreds of communities and got pissy when they were banned, there's heavy speculation that it's them.

That, or it could be right-wing neo-nazi chuds from the detonating-craniums instance that are butthurt that nobody wants to federate with them.

Or hexbear, the tankie equivalent of those chuds. Terminally online, and a lot of them have been on the fediverse for a while, ever since r/chapotraphouse got the banhammer on reddit. They got real mad when lemmy.world defederated from them the other day.

  1. hexbear got hit by the same DDoS
  2. virtually all of the hexbear comments about the defed are light-hearted jokes

Could be reddit , hiring people to kill the competition 😅 (jk)

You joke, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least.

This was honestly my first thought. Highly unlikely I’m sure but they’re not winning any awards for good decisions lately

Happened to voat everytine Pao did something. Part of why it failed.

voat failed because it became full of literal Nazis and basically all the hateful refugees from all the subs that got shut down. Pao shutting down FPH was a trigger but it made the worst of the platform migrate.

The fact that there were active communities on voat that were just too toxic for reddit like coontown and other just straight up totally racist subs made the place immediately turn into a massive toxic waste repository - at best it served as a quarantine zone for those people, and at worst it served as a communications platform for spreading additional hate.

I remember my first experience with voat being a poll discussing whether they should ban child porn. The split was ~90% in favor of banning, 10% against. 10% is concerningly high.

I was excited for voat at first and made an account but after interacting quickly saw what kind of people migrated there. I thought it was going to be like what lemmy is now, people sick of the corpos, boy oh boy was I wrong lol

Someone creating heaps of communities just to be a mod and then getting pissy about it doesn't sound like someone with the skills to run a DDOS attack.

They had nearly a thousand communities after joining, like an inhuman amount that wouldn't have been possible without scripting.

DDoS isn't a high skill attack by any means, they could have also hired somebody else to do it for them (there are some really big losers out there who will waste money on something like that).

They could pay for someone to do it. They also most likely created all those communities with a script, so they're not your average user.

You don't need motive to convict. Just the correct mental state (mens rea) and the commission of the relevant elements (actus reus). Motive helps, but it's not necessary.

But a DDOS attack would probably fall under the CFAA, possibly some other criminal statutes depending on the facts.

Yes criminal charges were brought against them. I don’t know what happened beyond that, however. It got pretty quiet once evidence was collected and the attack stopped.