Thank you for the amazing job, as always! Cloudflare is a solid solution :)
Imagine hosting a service for anyone else to use it, free of charge, no ads, free & open API, yet some idiots think it's fair to (D)DOS it.
There are more "interesting" targets, worst case - Reddit, who thinks everyone is just a number/noise.
Just leave Lemmy alone. :(
Why is Cloudflare so bad?
Cloudflare isn’t bad per se, but having huge amounts of the public internet behind a centralized provider is bad for the flexibility and resiliency of the internet as a whole.
It's not. People hate large companies that have a dominant position in their industry. Usually, that's fair. However, in the case of DDoS protection, you have to have a large overbearing presence to be able to have the capacity to withstand such attacks. People don't know how to see through what's typically true for what's true in this case. Do I like having a dominant player in an industry? Not particularly. Do I understand why it's necessary in this case? Yes.
I hope lemmy.world can avoid using Cloudflare which goes against the spirit of Fediverse as it's just an objectively evil company.
Agreed. This is an emergency fix. Will look for final solution later.
Can you give some insight to this?
There are thousands of reasons from centralizing internet, abusing their market power, implementing barriers on web automation that can only be bypassed by the priviledged to fingerprinting and tracking users across the whole internet. It's a major for-profit market capture corporation - it's evil by design.
Yeah, they're not someone I'd choose to give money or support to. Pretty disappointed it has come to this tbh.
What would the alternative be? DDOS protection inherently benefits from a centrally controlled network for defense, and also from a single entity handling as many of the defenses as possible so they can see them all being used.
I guess I could trivially see the need for a not-for-profit version of this, but that'd still be a central entity, just mandated by law and funded from taxpayer money or something.
But back to the question, what is the alternative? There's a good reason everyone goes with Cloudflare, it's about defending from DDOS attacks, and they do it better than others.
The real alternative is super simple. It requires just a little bit of knowledge. All we would need is to have someone who is an enterprise grade sysadmin with nothing but free time and a willingness to do something they will barely get paid for, if not lose money on. Then we also need to hire out a dedicated network and security engineer as well as a dedicated network traffic monitor. Then we would need to implement and setup our own hosting, as well as servers and configure our own databases. Of course all of this has to be done as cheaply as possible by people who are so good at multiple different sectors of IT and could easily be making more money doing work, but obviously out of the kindness of their hearts want to progress the fediverse and Lemmy rather than realizing they could be making 200k+ doing the same thing for a private company rather than a hobby.
In short: we need a network engineer, a security analyst, a sysadmin (or maybe 2?) all of whom work 24/7 for free and then purchase all of the physical hardware with the knowledge and capacity to set it up and maintain it to nearly break even just so we can shitpost rather than those people working and making 200k+ a year.
That's for for always keeping everyone up date. Sucks that you have these people wanting to DDOS a free community of people, I don't get it.
Either way thank you. Now to just somehow find a decentralized version of CloudFlare so we don't have to deal with there trackers that they have.
Commercial interest wants to see free communities like this die out. I won't name names.
Don't forget. Donate to them. There are no ads here. So we have to maintain the staff and servers.
Lemmy World
https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld?utm_campaign=creatorshare_fan
Lemmy Devs
https://www.patreon.com/dessalines?utm_campaign=creatorshare_fan
I don't understand why people want to take down websites. Especially sites like Lemmy, which isn't exactly sticking it to anyone because no one owns it!
Are they just Reddit groupies?
Any news? I'm still seeing empty pages sometimes (db errors I think), s6 wonder if the kiddies are somehow getting through despite cloudflare.
Thanks a lot for all the work you folks are doing to keep this instance up.
It's not ideal, but there's not a whole lot of options out there for DDoS mitigation.
Come on everyone, let's be better than this. Ruud literally said script kids, why do yall have to go and blame reddit? The Lemmy gets more attention, and chaotic dumbasses do their thing. You don't have to do any mental gymnastics to tie it back to spez.
Not sure if it’s related, but today on Mastodon, I’m unable to upload photos. Also can’t see pics from other users. Profile pics are mostly greyed out too.
Whats the motivation to DDOS? How mutch is specific malice to lemmy or lemmy.world itself and how much is genaric.
The kinds of people who do these things can have different motivations.
Some DDOS operators are "hired goons" who will DDOS whomever they're paid to. However, in order to demonstrate their capabilities, they need to do some damage first. If they can cause a big outage, they can later point to that outage and say "we did that" as proof that they're capable of doing damage.
Some DDOS operators are ideological or identity/drama-driven. They decide that they have a Cause, and that this justifies doing some damage. The same groups might do DDOS and also harassment, doxxing, spamming, etc. — their goal is to cause misery to the Bad People and "drive them off the Internet" by whatever means they find handy.
Some DDOS operators are just plain extortionists. They crash a site once or twice, then threaten to keep doing it forever until the site owner pays them off.
Some DDOS operators are bored kids making trouble.
Some DDOS operators are nation-state agencies trying to censor foreign sites that say things they don't like. In one case, the China government attacked GitHub to get at the anti-censorship site GreatFire.
The Chinese do their best to make everyone hate them, don't they?
Wouldn't be surprised if Cloudflare itself was hiring out blackhats to DDoS attack certain websites in order to get them into the fold, like racketeering. I mean this is America, I wouldn't put it past any company here, even ones pretending to be "virtuous"
Other companies I'd believe, but Cloudflare has never seemed slimy
Cloudflare houses and has housed many shady and downright awful websites without any problems from their "morality department"
This is like saying Microsoft isn't slimy either because so many people use their product
It is obviously not. Why would it be?
This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.
For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.
Any support requests are best sent to info@lemmy.world e-mail.
If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.
If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us
