There is a status page up on https://status.lemmy.world

We have been dealing with some DDOS attacks and are still taking extra measures to get everything more stable but we are working with people in different timezones so it's not always as easy to react.

So yes, we are working on improving things.

We should probably have released a statement before going over into action and blocking them. But an official statement on this is coming asap.

!boostforlemmy@lemmy.world saw it's official release and the announcement over on Reddit gave us a bump, much like when !syncforlemmy@lemmy.world was officially released a while back.

Also there might have been a (albeit smaller) bump a few days ago due to Reddit removing the ability to opt out of ad personalization.

It's a disgusting, terrible instance. Back when I added them to our blocklist and fediseer they even had pedobear on display as if they were proud. They have a MAP community and Pedo memes.

The link posted by OP has our findings in it with a few of their posts on an archive site for those who don't want to go to the instance directly: (https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/rqd2.net)

This was not about "abusive members" this was about a member having too many communities according to you. We both seem to have a very different definition of "abuse".

The user in question does have a lot of communities but he is very active and has different moderators who he manages. Also, when the moderators of these communities do well he transfers the community over to them. As recently as yesterday when he transferred !movies@lemmy.world and !marvelstudios@lemmy.world.

While he has a lot of communities he does a good job managing his communities and training moderators and is making our lives as admins easier. If someone has a lot of communities and doesn't do anything with them, that is squatting and we take action. I think we have a good track record of that.

So unless there is something we are missing I really would not call any of what the user in question did "abusive".

Lastly the best way to get someone to look at your problem is to use the report feature. The reason you got no reply in nine days is because there was no problem.

Asking for nothing but patience :)

I mean, it's easy to go over to feddit.nl and see they only have one admin who has not been active in almost two weeks.

Full transparancy: the abuse we were dealing with from that instance was vote manipulation and worse, csam. Especially in the case of csam we can not wait for days for a reaction.

Vinden wij ook hoor

Edit: we think so too

Better learn dutch now for when it becomes our instance's primary language once @ruud, @quinten and I pushed out the other admins.

We are not 'dropping' messages from smaller instances. @ruud@lemmy.world and others did tighten up some things to fend off some attacks but that should not interfere with the federation.

If you could have at least mentioned your instance name we could ask our backend administrators to have a look and we could get back to you with an informed answer.

We will not close registrations, what we will do is show people information on how the fediverse works and give them the option to register on other instances. That will be implemented in the next couple of days.

Heya! Not really. It's just a few communities that are being spammed really hard, so only those are removed. I think the work you're doing by flagging these spam accounts is already very helpful to Ernest and his team. He himself was kind enough to join us in this thread and give us some more information. For now all we can do is wait..

Thank you for your patience and understanding :)

CSAM post

The amount of people in here claiming there were no takedown requests is a bit frustrating. As if we were blocking those communities for shits and giggles. Sure there was that Bungie troll but around the same time we DID get a takedown request for threads in the piracy community. Threads that didn't even include direct links, it was just a discussion. Whatever you guys think, it was a lot of shit to deal with on top of what we were already dealing with.

We were also considering different hosting options to counter those DDOS attacks back than and that would mean moving the server to another country and thus exposing members of our team to legal issues should shit hit the fan. One of our team members back then was in the legal team for the hosting company we were considering moving to. So he wasn't just making this up, he literally wrote the rules.

In the end we decided not to move to that hosting company. And we took some other measures by creating some tooling to deal with this stuff better. And that takes time.

Undoing the block means more work for us too. Work we do for free on our own time, next to having jobs and a families. And we're definitely not a corporate entity with fancy lawyers.

Lmao 💀

Yes! Thank you @ruud@lemmy.world ❤️

We can't always please everyone. And sometimes we have to make decisions or do things we personally don't like or we would like to see differently but we have to think about both our team and our userbase.

But thank you for your trust and welcome back.

Instead of mentioning your instance so we can help you you seem to have other motives.

Edit: but if you want the logic. We had discussions internally as well as with other instance admins about this and the conclusion was - even from other instance admins - that closing registrations would be a bad idea. Currently a lot of people are sent to lemmy.world from reddit and 3rd party apps for example. If people land here and are not able to register they might not look into it further and give up because it is too complicated or overwhelming. So that would actually be worse for the fediverse. That is why we want to make the sign up page more informative and provide options.

Release notes for 0.18.3 can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md

Hey Ernest,

Having dealt with spam waves ourselves we are certainly understanding of the situation! I read your status updates and what has been going on. That is also why we choose to close the problematic communities/magazines instead of defederating.

We really hope that you find the time and peace to resolve these things. There is no bad will here, we know that these things need time. If there is anything we can do to help feel free to reach out.

We are not a bastion of Open Source software. We use it yes, support it yes. There are plenty of things we use FOSS for but we have zero obligations to lock us down to only use FOSS. We use what is convenient and try to listen to the needs of our users.

There is lemmy.world, there is mastodon.world, there is a matrix space and synapse server. Then there is calckey.world a firefish server and I probably forget a few other things that are hosted by @ruud@lemmy.world.

And then yes, there is a discord server.

I think @ruud@lemmy.world and our infra team do PLENTY for the foss community by hosting all of these services, making them available and filing bug reports. They are even in touch with a lot of developers on different foss projects.

Lemmy World defederated as soon as we became aware of this instance.

It is created by @rglullis@communick.news who said this was something requested by many but we really didn't see the advantage of it.

Rate limits are being tweaked to combat ddos. You might experience some issues while they are being optimised. Apologies

Lemmy.world was already running a version with this security patch but indeed that's also in 0.18.2!

I resized it. It's 1,2MB now

It's not that we can not handle the load caused by users or by the amount of communities. It's because of DDOS attacks and even with cloudflare some of these attacks are challenging due to the way lemmy works. No instance is safe from these attacks but the bigger instances get targeted. We weren't the only instance that went down today.

I don't think we do anything wrong here? None of us are being paid, we all put in a lot of time and effort to keep things running. You don't know how many passionate people are involved "behind the scenes" seeing you call out the admins of lemmy.world.
You can't please everyone, and some people will always find a stick. But I still think a lot of people believe in our team, our policies and what we are trying to do here. If that's not your thing, fine, you can look elsewhere.

Yes! Good job @ruud@lemmy.world 👍

Btw this is only for NEW posts. Existing posts still won't show the thumbnails

It's the same people from exploding heads that are in these threads. They circumvent the defederation by taking over another instance.

There's:

• Element https://element.io/
• FluffyChat https://fluffychat.im/
• Cinny https://cinny.in/
• Beeper https://www.beeper.com/

For now I stick with Element. It's just seems to be the most feature-rich of them.

Everyone involved is a volunteer. If it's not for you it's not for you. All good!

Took a while before we announced it but it was running on photon.lemmy.world for a while already. Love how fast you implemented the changes that were brought up by everyone that was testing. Absolutely amazing job. I think you are the first one to get the admin tools in too!

So where can I donate as a thank you?

That is an entirely different discussion and definitely no "abusive user" as you made it look here. That is an opinion. I am done with you report trolling. Find another instance

Since it's more focused on Lemmy World communities it would make sense to have some affinity with the instance so a local account would be preferred.

It's the attacks. The amount of users or communities is not the problem but there are people who want us to close down (registrations) for a variety of reasons.

Yes but when people start creating accounts to post CSAM it doesn't leave us much choice.

Because he also deleted user comments after being removed from his position as moderator - using access to a moderator-bot that wasn't removed yet - we have now permanently banned his account and his alts.

thanks spez!

They have been defederated on Lemmy World for months: https://lemmy.world/post/2498330

But you are on aussie.zone so they might still be federated and will explain why you see their posts and communities.

Image uploads had an issue a while ago but should be working. Which client are you using?

Indeed. This is a lot more work.

Sometimes we put in some effort!