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.
People should stick with the instance otherwise you’re just encouraging those tankies and nazis to use DDOS attacks again to bring down instances that defederate with them, don’t let them know that they’re successful. This opportunistic concern trolling around lemmy.world’s downtime needs to stop. As the admins said, sooner or later “small” instances would have 100k users and would start having these issues all at once if it weren’t for lemmy.world experiencing them first hand. Some DB optimizations were pushed to Lemmy thanks to lemmy.world.
I know you’re a prolific poster around here, so I feel like I need to tell you of a better solution.
All federated servers are part of an alliance. This means that https://sh.itjust.works/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world is where you can go if Lemmy.world goes down. Eventually, sh.itjust.works will copy your data to lemmy.world (as per the Federation protocol). As long as Lemmy.world comes back up every now and then (and long enough for the posts to sync), then sh.itjust.works/c/whatever@lemmy.world will function as an effective proxy / secondary location to have discussions.
Or https://lemmy.ca/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world, or whatever other community is hosted here.
Simply make your alt-account on a 2nd server, then promote this 2nd account to moderator for any communities you’re a part of. Bam, now you got a 2nd place to work your communities even as the main site goes down. Leverage federation to our advantages.
I tried that. Federation is somewhat broken. We just have to be patient.
Yeah, I’m with you. I’ve been wanting to see a post like this from the admins because if it turned out the issue was something related to resources or infrastructure, I’d use a different account as my main. But I didn’t want to do that if it was resulting from attacks because I refuse to be manipulated by assholes and I refuse to let them win.
I’m staying with .world out of solidarity. I have another account on .ca that I use when world is down, but this one stays my main.
Removed by mod
y’all at lemmygrad really seem to have some bot actively notifying you of any mention of the word tankie
The admin is the one implying it in the OP
I didn’t get that from their post at all. I can easily think of at least two politically motivated de-federations, one left and one right, that have happened in the recent past both of which had communities with sufficient technical knowledge to do something like this.
I must be missing something because you said he’s not implying that, then immediately implied it yourself