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).
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.
You're right, and one of the reasons I decided to start a community here was because @ernest has done a fantastic job laying out the plans for scale at kbin (both the instance and the platform as a whole) thus far - detail here. Thus far he's the only instance owner I've seen with a real roadmap, and actively applying for grant funding to cover scaling costs. It's good to see - kbin is definitely his baby and he takes great care of it.
Regarding other small kbin instances, you might look at kglitch.social. @kglitch has made some frontend changes that bring it more in line with Mastodon and Lemmy, and I haven't seen an outage yet.
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.
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.
Massive amounts of organic traffic to too small a server technically is a DDOS, even if unintentional rather than malicious. So, both to varying degrees, probably?
It’s DDOS. The admins for World have explicitly said so, and even said exactly how the attacks have been perpetrated by exploiting calls that require a lot of processing time to overload the server.
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.
On a more on topic note: Lemmy is small. We dont have the population to warrant that specific of a community, yet. I’d recommend starting by joining a community about vinyl, making posts about vinyl care, and seeing how they do. When you’re taking up a significant percentage of a larger parent topics feed, I’d say it’s time to splinter off
I’d just add that we run the risk of being extremely unappealing if we have too many communities with near 0 activity. We’re better served at the beginning having fewer, more general communities, to attract critical masses
It’s also a problem with algorithms. Big communities drown out smaller ones because the sorting only looks at absolute numbers. Change is underway though.
I am gonna be a lil wary about breathing while very close to my records now, I should’ve guessed there was something terrible about the big fun plastic music discs 😭 thank you for sharing the video!
Various clues, like what URLs they are requesting, what IPs/regions it's from, if it appears to be real clients based on user agent and ability to execute javascript, and so on.
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.
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