Sorry for the ~26 minutes of downtime, I might have left certbot in a 95% configured state last time I was making changes....

Blahaj's recent troubles have motivated me to take care of the OS updates I've been procrastinating on, such as our proxmox and various DB servers.

I'm expecting under 30 minutes to take care of it all, should be back by 9pm PST.

Thanks to a particularly annoying botnet, everyone's favorite anime cat girl firewall is now helping protect piefed.ca & lemmy.ca from bots and scrapers.

This is requests per second and these are all thousands of scrapers on residential IPs hammering us:

They'd increase their usage until the site started struggling, then move on. I banned their user agents, but have no interest in a cat & mouse game. Anubis should hopefully keep things running much smoother for everyone.

Let me know if you have any trouble!

Some recent threads have pulled lemmy.ca into the drama around lemmy.world and Luminous5481. We banned them a few days before LW did, and claims have been made that we're aligned with LW in the pro-zionist behavior LW has been accused of.

~8 days ago Luminous had "murder all Zionists" in their name, during which time they banned recursive_recursion@piefed.ca from the community agitprop memes. The reason given was "zionism, genocide apologia" with a 74 year expiry time. Recursive saw this, was confused and insulted by the insinuation / threat, and retaliatory banned Luminous. This happened 2 days before the LW issue began, and from our point of view was unrelated.

Recursive posted in our internal chat immediately after they placed the ban, letting us all know. We all agreed that being flippant about who Luminous labels a zionist while also repeatedly calling for the murder of zionists, wasn't appropriate for lemmy.ca. It violates our of our "Be Civil" rule, and is toxic behaviour that doesn't belong here.

None of us knew at the time why Recursive had been banned, although yesterday while digging I found this thread. Luminous placed the ban because Recursive had banned Deceptichum@quokk.au with a "suspiciously similar ban message" to one MrKaplan used. Recursive used "Troll and perpetual history of bad faith behavior" vs MrKaplan removing a comment as "troll". That's a pretty shitty reason to label someone a zionist genocide apologist, while you're calling for the murder of all zionists.

None of us support Israel, we're all horrified by what they're doing. That doesn't mean throwing around death threats on Lemmy should be tolerated.

Context if you're unfamiliar with this issue:

• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/67441787
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/67441443

I'm super excited at the prospect of getting a nice dog park in mount pleasant, it's sorely needed.

I've just completed moving lemmy.ca and piefed.ca away from using Cloudflare's proxy service, this means traffic now comes directly from our server instead of being routed through any US based companies. Pixelfed.ca is still on deflect.ca for the moment.

Let me know please if you run into any problems or errors!

Note that in order to avoid making too many major changes at once, our DNS is still hosted by cloudflare. I'll be moving that away from them later this week

Update April 3rd: We've off their DNS now too, and pixelfed.ca is now off deflect as well. All done rearranging!

With the recent willingness of the US Government to pressure its tech agencies into revealing user data without a proper judicial warrant, we've decided it's overdue for us migrate away from Cloudflare.

We'll be transitioning our sites over to https://deflect.ca/ over the next week or so, starting with pixelfed first before doing lemmy and piefed.

I hope to be able to do this without any noticeable downtime, but it is a major config change that will require some backend changes as well. I'll make an announcement before/after and you can always check https://status.fedecan.ca/

Update Feb 16: pixelfed has been migrated to deflect

Update Feb 20: I'm working with deflect on improving performance before migrating lemmy / piefed over. Currently pixelfed load times aren't great due to traffic often hitting edge nodes way out in Europe

Update Mar 17: Unfortunately performance with Deflect isn't where I want it to be since their nodes are out East and our server is in Vancouver. As a result we're just going to be dropping the CDN altogether and hosting directly off our server. I'm planning to do the switchover this weekend (March 20-22), but in the meantime you can use https://test.lemmy.ca/ or https://test.piefed.ca/ if you'd like to bypass Cloudflare.