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Why is Lemmy World down? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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Why do the instances keep going down? It makes me think that this is not a reliable social network, but the alternatives are not as good.

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[–] 15 points 3 years ago (3 children)

You're thinking about it the wrong way. Despite a major hub of lemmy being down if you have an account on another instance you can continue using the network nearly as though nothing had happened. Individual instances may have greater or lesser reliability but the social network is very robust.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    If thats how Lemmy should be used it would be helpful if we could identify yourself across servers. Like email has pgp that lets you sign your emails to prove it's really you. Would be cool. 😎

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    I follow nine other instances.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 children)

    Then you should appreciate that the reliability of the social network is just fine. The idea is this social network isn't dependent on one instance.

    Now, granted, if a big one struggles, the network loses some communities temporarily, but the network is stable and other instances remain active.

    It's just growing pains from an extreme influx almost literally overnight and generally just that this is somewhat early days. It's going to be messy, it always is early on, no matter what the social network.

    Also...there's a non-zero chance it's getting hit relentlessly by DDOS.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    What's DDOS?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    DDOS = denial of service attack. Attacker sends a bunch of requests overloading a service and causing other clients to experience.timeouts due to the service not being.abe.to.handle the load.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Distributed denial of service.

    That first D is the one that makes the attack a real problem.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I honestly forgot what the first D was at that moment lol. While I agree it technically can be done pretty badly without distributed attacks. I read in the past couple of years of an approach attackers used was to make an application DOS itself from a single request. I think it required a vulnerability in the application in this instance though.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Yep, this is key. If you’re getting a bunch of malicious traffic from one source, that’s easily fixed. Just drop the traffic.

    But when that traffic is coming from hundreds or thousands of sources, that becomes much harder to address. Can you just drop traffic from those sources? Sure! But then you also risk dropping legitimate traffic.

    There are also services that can automate the detection and prevention of DDOS attacks such as CloudFlare and Akamai, but these can get expensive very quickly, so it can significantly increase the cost to running the instance in question.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    I read that it was a DDOS but I wonder what the motivation for doing that is? It isn't like you can extort any money out of lemmy.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    Some people are just spiteful shitheads. Also, there's been a bit of a wave of DDOS attacks against US-registered sites lately- Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction website, got DDOSed a few weeks back. Seems like they're going after any site that doesn't have good DDOS protection and is based in the US.

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