At this point, many people have been bailing from the server due to the uptime issues. What’s the rub?
My guess, some loveless planarian with a botnet felt they didn’t get enough attention from mommy and decided to hit .world with a couple DDOS attacks.
They’re being targeted for constant DDoS attacks. Could be multiple reasons. But the takeaway should be to spread out evenly through the fediverse. Don’t all pile into .world (as I post this on my .world account).
I’ve been going to sh.itjust.works. You can find a list of other instances here as well.
Been on kbin.social for a month and it’s been pretty solid. Note it’s a different platform than lemmy (designed to read both lemmy and mastodon), but does a great job posting to and handling the content from lemmy platforms. There’s growing pains here too, but the uptime has been good.
I think that the dev and some volunteers at kbin.social has done a lot of work on scaling up that instance, but even so, kbin.social will probably hit hard-to-fix scaling issues at some point. It’s also a big instance, like lemmy.world.
I’d been looking at another (presently small) US-based one-person kbin instance, was planning to hop over if it stayed up to help spread load, but it looks like it went down.
I suppose that once a number of instances have a track record of staying up for N months and with their uptime records established, it’ll be easier to figure out what instances are good alternatives, are likely around for the long haul, and which ones will vanish in the wind.
Lemmy Explorer can help give a big picture view of what’s out there, both in instances and in communities. Kbin instances are also viewable, you have to select them from the top right menu.
Probably those ultra right-wingers from that recently defederated instance being the adult man-children they always are.
It could be tbut the most recent de-federation controversy didn’t involve a right wing instance.
IIRC these rolling DOS attacks started before the most recent defed, though. They’ve been happening for a while.
I know it’s easy to blame the alt right for everything, but the hexbear community was a communist community.
The big reason for being a target is the size. Why attack smaller ones with less effect? Like making a virus for anything besides Windows. But maybe the long term benefit is the movement of some to other instances, balancing out the loads.
They were getting hit with a lot of DDoS attacks a week or two ago, that may still be going on. Also they took off faster than most instances so a lot of this is just growing pains.
many people have been bailing from the server
That’s not a bad thing, the content is shared between instances so you can get it on the other sites too. People going to other sites will hopefully help balance the load and possibly help with the growing pains. I haven’t created an account on another instance yet, but I’ve been visiting other instances when .world goes down.
It’s like a fun* little cat and mouse game, you figure out the patterns to block specific traffic, then they adapt and you start again. I even saw some users comment the other day they were being hit with false positives and blocked because the blocking was too aggressive. Fortunately there are companies that specialize in this kind of stuff like cloudflare. But that costs money so it wasn’t added until just recently, so it’s possible attacks are still getting around that.
*obnoxious
I’ve hopped to another server due to the abysmal uptime of late. I’ll continue checking in though. I know they’re working on adding sysops so I’m sure things will improve.
