Chronicle the life and tale of the fediverse (+ matrix)
Largely a sublemmy about capturing drama, from fediverse spanning drama to just lemmy drama.
Includes lore like how a instance got it's name, how an instance got defederated, how an admin got doxxed, fedihistory etc
(New) This sub's intentions is to an archive/newspaper, as in preferably don't get into fights with each other or the ppl featured in the drama
Tags: fediverse news, lemmy news, lemmyverse
Partners:
Well I am an American and I support American values, so as far as I’m concerned it’s wrong and illegal.
Also isn’t lemmy.world in America? Pretty sure it is since they did remove two of their communites for this very reason:
This is the dumbest detail for me to get hung up on, but lemmy.world is hosted in Finland on servers rented from a German company by a Dutch admin.
Also what American citizen actually gives a fuck about copyright law or Internet piracy? They sound like the biggest blue lives matter flag waving bootlicker, and they probably vote Trump.
It’s probably a world admin. They’re really gross neo-libs. Remember their reason for defederating with hexbear was that they wanted to dismantle NATO. They’re legalist chuds.
And of course as an American with American values, I believe that "wrong" and "illegal" are entirely overlapping concepts.
Don't create accounts on different Lemmy servers they said, one is all you need they said. Simply find the one where the values and judgement of the admins wholly reflect your own despite there being no effective way to make that determination.
Huh, I don't think I heard that a single time. I did hear that you could access most content from any account, but I was encouraged early on to make multiple anyway.
Like I don't want to blow it outta proportion but this seems like a bad sign for the future of lemmy if it's that easy to just go around and convince someone to defederate.
I honestly don't think this sort of drama is a big deal. The users are empowered to do something about it, unlike centralized platforms, where drama gets a result like we see on reddit: nothing happens.
But people are just going to leave. Most people won't want to put up with it.
That's my point.
But they don't have to leave Lemmy, they just have to leave the instance.
It's only a matter of time before lemmy.world defederates from everyone.
Except Threads
Good. Well not good exactly, but kind of okay.
We could do with getting rid of them, they're too big, and too much of a target, and everyone keeps using that one instance instead of spreading out. Completely negating any real benefit.
So if they are going to defederate from everyone, forcing users to move to a more diverse range of smaller instances, that's okay.
Defederation is quickly becoming the first resort for admins.
World is trash and it needs to be broken up. The admins are trash, their rules are trash, they’re full of nazis and they go down all of the time. It’s profoundly stupid that we let them be the on ramp. We should all defederate from them to force an exodus.
Hard to fault them for the down time being that they're getting regularly hit with ddos attacks. Someone sure wants them gone.
Yes it is. That’s a solvable issue.
They have "solved" it many times. The people doing it clearly know what the most resource intensive requests are with Lemmy, and whenever one vector is patched they come up with another.
To be clear: every Lemmy instance has the same vulnerability as World does. World is likely getting attacked because they're the biggest. They aren't having any other kind of resource issue - it's not a problem because of the number of people.
I'm personally faulting the people attacking it and not the admins. They didn't cause the situation, and I'm not going to let assholes manipulate me into leaving.
I mean if their poor performance continues, people will probably either stop using it or stop recommending it
It’s been like this since I got here. They take some sort of weird pride in it being terribly run.
I can’t even load the world post because they’re down as usual. What a piece of shit instance. How are they the largest? Maybe lemming is the best term.
They're probably down because being the largest made them a target. Every other instance is vulnerable to the same attacks. Below is the text from their post on the subject.
vvvvvvvv
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.
Boooooooo
According to LW TOS, it probably should have defederated if dbzer0 was basically entirely piracy. But, that user was an obvious troll and the lamest narc I've ever seen.