AFK BRB Chocolate (CA version)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I’m halfway through scrolling this long thread, and this is the first comment I’ve seen that isn’t overly cynical. It’s also correct.

    I’ve been working for 38 years, and I’ve been someone who makes promotion decisions for 15 of them. The third one is helpful, not essential, but the others are super important. The people who rise to leadership positions aren’t necessarily the top technical people, they’re the ones who do those things with a good attitude.

    The other thing I’d add is that they’re people who are able to see the big picture and how the details relate to it, which is part of strategic thinking.


  • It’s funny, I was sitting on the couch browsing Lemmy on my tablet when my phone made a weird notification sound. Pulled it out and it said it was an earthquake warning. I sat there like an idiot thinking “WTF is that about” when the room started shaking and I remembered we have an early warning system.

    You know, it’s not cool to have an earthquake when it’s pouring rain outside. I was 1.5 miles from the epicenter of the Northridge quake, and had to get out of my apartment, but at least it was a beautifully clear night outside. No fair doubling up on destructive phenomena (though neither Hilary or the quake looks like they’ll cause any significant problems where I am).








  • They’re probably down because being the largest made them a target. Every other instance is vulnerable to the same attacks. Below is the text from their post on the subject.

    vvvvvvvv

    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.


  • They have “solved” it many times. The people doing it clearly know what the most resource intensive requests are with Lemmy, and whenever one vector is patched they come up with another.

    To be clear: every Lemmy instance has the same vulnerability as World does. World is likely getting attacked because they’re the biggest. They aren’t having any other kind of resource issue - it’s not a problem because of the number of people.

    I’m personally faulting the people attacking it and not the admins. They didn’t cause the situation, and I’m not going to let assholes manipulate me into leaving.