mrmanager

The attackers found another slow db query to exploit, so had to put some temporary measures in place.

Will post more details later!

This time they actually took down the instance for several hours.

Hi guys,

I wanted to ask you about our local communities here. I feel like a lot of them are not really active, and the most active one (like Conservative) has mostly locked posts, so people cant participate in discussions.

I wanted to get some input from you guys, what do you think? Should we have communities with locked posts so people cant comment? Does it still serve a purpose? Or should communities always allow discussions? My own opinion is that they should.

And should we clean up communities and remove inactive ones, making more room for local discussions?

The reason I started thinking about this is because I noticed that some other instances remove posts that are completely legal to discuss. They are just removed because admins/moderators dont like their content. Which is exactly like on reddit then.

Hi guys,

Another ddos attack so site was slow/unavailable for a while.

I disabled the alternative user interfaces since they are used in the attacks. Will think of some better long term solutions. 🥊 😄

Update 2: Another one at the moment, so site is slow. :)

Update: Another 30000 bots joined the party, so cpu usage is high at the moment. Site is slower than normal.

Appearently about 17500 bots are attempting to slow down our instance and eating bandwidth by grabbing the same files over and over.

They are banned for now but its an ongoing battle against these guys. Just wanted to let you know in case you notice worse performance. :)

Hi guys,

Server has been quite slow the last couple of days, and it turns out its because the old.lemmy.today user interface was being hammered and scraped by bots. I turned them off now temporarily while i look into this.

In the mean time, enjoy a faster instance, hopefully.. :)

Edit: And the user interfaces are back online.

Now everyone is rate limited on their real ip before hitting any of the alternate user interfaces. This means the web server can protect against bots hammering the site.

Currently it looks like its working. Both the default web site and the alternate user interfaces are fast again. Give the alternate ones a try if you are using a web browser to access the site. :)

On June 27:th, the https certificate for lemmy.today was supposed to renew itself. Its set up to automatically renew every 3 months, and its been working perfectly since the site was started over 2 years ago.

But this time it failed to do so, due to a syntax error in the web server config that was not noticed until this incident took place.

Its been fixed now but took more than a day unfortunantly. Sincere apologies for the long delay - it was because I was on vacation in Madeira and in the process of travelling home that day.

Life finds a way to kick us in the balls sometimes.

We are now on latest version. We had some downtime related to this. Normally its quick to update, but this time a database update was needed that took quite some time.

It was about 4 months since we had some downtime so not too bad. Hopefully we go another 4 months (or more) until the next one. :)

Sometimes I think people forget how much Lemmy users have incommon, and we just focus on the differences.

Lets look at some introduction letters from users lately who joined this instance:

I'm a technoligist based out of the United States. I want to explore the fediverse protocols, so I'm trying Lemmy and ActivityPub. Also, I jumped off Reddit when they began restricting API access heavily and have been looking for a link-aggregator alternative ever since.

I am an astronomer, nature lover in heart. I am tired of using apps and websites from companies spying on us and owning basically everything. I will be happy to switch from reddit to lemmy. I am curious though how do you know that a bot cannot write such a text.

Great interest in knowledge and competency building through balanced use of technology. I am currently in the process of moving away from the tech giants and their madness.

Reddit sucks now, want a decentralized, not profit driven alternative

I am a concerned citizen of a country run by Nazis and I am trying to escape most social media sites that harvest our data, I have been pointed in this direction by a privacy enthusiast who said this is the land of the free, Or something like that.

I am a longtime (15 years) reddit user, and I am looking for alternatives that are not driven by corporate interests.

We all really want the same thing. I also want the same thing, which is why I run this instance.

You are all part of a growing community of people who dont want the typical social media experience from ad-funded big tech companies who only care about profits. I think thats really cool.

Thanks for being part of Lemmy guys. :)

Hi everyone,

We just had some unexpected downtime due to a disk quickly getting full over night... :/

We will adjust the monitoring to start alerting us earlier for disk space running out so we can actually do something about it.

I took the chance to install the latest OS patches and updates now though since the server was anyway down.

Hope you didnt notice the downtime too much!

Just wanted to say hello to everyone new joining the instance lately. Seems like reddits ideas of introducing paywalled subreddits got a few more people to think twice about using that site.

I just wanted to encourage new users to install a good mobile client for Lemmy. The web interface is OK but the mobile apps really take Lemmy to another level by being much faster and more user friendly.

I personally like Boost for Lemmy and Sync but there are many others to choose from. More are linked in the sidebar.

After you do that, make sure to subscribe to many communities. You see a list under the Communities tab and you can choose to subscribe with a click.

You can also go here and see all communities in the entire lemmy universe:

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Me and @Buelldozer@lemmy.today are trying to keep the bots and spammers out and it goes pretty well so far.

Hope you like Lemmy more than Reddit, most of us here do.. :)

Hi all,

We were getting several reports of people linking to csam content in the signal groups community. We tried to contact the moderator but no response in several days.

Its difficult to moderate this kind of content. Moderators of a lemmy community cannot be expected to visit each posted group around the clock to make sure it doesnt have csam content. Signal groups can change their content at any time.

So sorry to say, it had to be removed. If you were using it, I hope you find some other way to find new signal groups.

We decided to double the server memory and add more cpu, since we were close to running out sometimes.

So if you notice higher performance, you know what the reason is now. :)

Short post, but just wanted to mention it.