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.
Once again, thank you for the transparency and for keeping us (the users) informed, as well as for all the work you do to keep lemmy.world going.
Hopefully all the attacks you guys endure end up helping lemmy patch those attack vectors and make lemmy an overall safer and more robust place.
These malicious volunteers are helping to identify problem queries so they can be fixed. In the long term, it makes lemmy stronger.
Would be nice if they could just post an issue report, though.
In all seriousness, we all appreciate your work. These are the growing pains that are to be expected, and your hard work and transparency (and writing it up at a level that even I can understand) is welcome.
Thanks for all you guys do! While the lack of reliability can be frustrating your efforts do not go unnoticed. Thanks again.
I think you should take 5% of donations to pay yourselves personally. I appreciate your work!
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I would be happy to support a special fundraiser to get the admins some beers.
Definitely need to pay themselves. Doing this for free is not sustainable over long periods.
I’m more than okay with the old Jimmy Wales treatment once or twice a year.
They should take the Kennedy package at their local dive bar every Friday.
Would it be possible to have the error page when you are being attacked/there is an outage point to some other lemmy instances to go to?
I think that could be a big help if there is an issue when a new user tries to check out .world for the first time. They will at least have a link to click on to check out what lemmy is like on another instance and maybe sign up there too.
They are inadvertently helping Lemmy become more robust
I was just thinking it could be someone with that goal in mind. Better to fix this stuff now.
Yes! Same goes for those saying “Lemmy.world is too big”. Having a large instance is good real world case for addressing scaling issues that might impact more and more instances as the overall Fediverse grows.
In the future a small Lemmy instance may be the size of today’s Lemmy.world.
There are quite a few InfoSec people here. While I have never held an official InfoSec job I do have a degree. However, my degree is debatable about whether it actually educates me as intended.
Point being there are a lot of people that have more knowledge than me as well as experience but I want to learn. As someone who is always listening to security podcasts like Hacking Humans or Darknet Diaries, naked hacking, or even InfoSec journalism around popular ongoing issues in the world like Click Here. I always want to learn and get experience.
I currently work in IT for a hospital. Is there any way to help with this kind of thing to learn and build on knowledge to help? To volunteer time to potentially see what is going on?
IF you were a bad actor, this is exactly the argument to use to get more inside information to use in the next attack.
Establishing trust is the first problem to be overcome.
So there should be a test as there is no proper way for most to prove they aren’t a bad actor. That is the unfortunate bit. I know I am not a bad actor and would genuinely like to help. Insider threat is a real issue and I can understand the lack of trust but how would I prove my trust?
A resume? Work experience? All of those could mean nothing if you intend to harm the system anyways.
I would personally like to devote time to learning this kind of thing to assist.
So what’s going on is the adversaries continuously hitting the lemmy.world server. On its own, a DDOS like that would be manageable - they’re much more defeatable these days
But they found request paths that run expensive db functions, giving them enough bang for their buck to make an impact, even tucked behind cloudflare.
As for mitigation, cloudflare and a larger server help, but ultimately lemmy needs some refactoring - right now it’s very liberal with the database calls. It needs to divide those up and get more granular with API calls, look at what can be optimized on the DB side, maybe do some caching/memoization… Basically, it needs to become a more mature piece of software in a hurry
Going further, there’s things like horizontal scaling - there’s even thoughts of how we could leverage the nature of the fediverse to share the load through federation.
I’m a dev, I don’t know much about administration so I’m not sure how you could help, but there’s plenty of work to go around. I think a database expert would be the most useful right now.
There’s messing with configs to tune everything for better performance - that’s out of my expertise, but I’m under the impression that there’s some significant gains to be had there
If it’s in your wheelhouse, you could look at different technologies that might give better performance - the current stack seems like it was chosen mostly with ease of development in mind, if you could make a strong argument for changing some of it out it might get traction.
As far as cyber security in general, if you want to get started - step 1 is basically locking things down, and then setting up monitoring tools and getting experience with them. Basically reading logs taken to the next level. I’m pretty sure they have that handled here, but this problem will never go away
Another heartfelt thanks—both for the hard work, and for the transparency.
Thank you guys for the write up and for helping to keep things running.
Thanks for the update, if there’s ways we can help please mention them. Be it about know-how, be it financial, be it about our behaviour when interacting with the server, be it about general knowledge we could provide.
Thanks for the update and all the hard work.
Have you guys contacted law enforcement? It may surprise you. A startup I worked for had the same issue and contacted the FBI. They were able to quickly (within hours) find the person doing it despite him using VPNs and other tools for OpSec.
Did it result in charges for the person doing it?
For this, I want to see the motivation for DDOSing Lemmy lol.
Yes criminal charges were brought against them. I don’t know what happened beyond that, however. It got pretty quiet once evidence was collected and the attack stopped.
There was a user who made hundreds of communities and got pissy when they were banned, there’s heavy speculation that it’s them.
Could be the instance with the raving tankies that was defederated.
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Could be reddit , hiring people to kill the competition 😅 (jk)
This was honestly my first thought. Highly unlikely I’m sure but they’re not winning any awards for good decisions lately
You joke, but I wouldn’t be surprised in the least.
Happened to voat everytine Pao did something. Part of why it failed.
voat failed because it became full of literal Nazis and basically all the hateful refugees from all the subs that got shut down. Pao shutting down FPH was a trigger but it made the worst of the platform migrate.
The fact that there were active communities on voat that were just too toxic for reddit like coontown and other just straight up totally racist subs made the place immediately turn into a massive toxic waste repository - at best it served as a quarantine zone for those people, and at worst it served as a communications platform for spreading additional hate.
I remember my first experience with voat being a poll discussing whether they should ban child porn. The split was ~90% in favor of banning, 10% against. 10% is concerningly high.
they have freeze peaches
I was excited for voat at first and made an account but after interacting quickly saw what kind of people migrated there. I thought it was going to be like what lemmy is now, people sick of the corpos, boy oh boy was I wrong lol
China lady bad
Someone creating heaps of communities just to be a mod and then getting pissy about it doesn’t sound like someone with the skills to run a DDOS attack.
DDoS isn’t a high skill attack by any means, they could have also hired somebody else to do it for them (there are some really big losers out there who will waste money on something like that).
Never underestimate the pettiness of the u/gallowboobs of the world.
You had to Digg deep to get that reference
gallowboobs
hahahaha!
They could pay for someone to do it. They also most likely created all those communities with a script, so they’re not your average user.
They had nearly a thousand communities after joining, like an inhuman amount that wouldn’t have been possible without scripting.
That, or it could be right-wing neo-nazi chuds from the detonating-craniums instance that are butthurt that nobody wants to federate with them.
Or hexbear, the tankie equivalent of those chuds. Terminally online, and a lot of them have been on the fediverse for a while, ever since r/chapotraphouse got the banhammer on reddit. They got real mad when lemmy.world defederated from them the other day.
- hexbear got hit by the same DDoS
- virtually all of the hexbear comments about the defed are light-hearted jokes
Maybe a mix of both?
You don’t need motive to convict. Just the correct mental state (mens rea) and the commission of the relevant elements (actus reus). Motive helps, but it’s not necessary.
But a DDOS attack would probably fall under the CFAA, possibly some other criminal statutes depending on the facts.
I know, I just want to know what the motive is.
“Vengence is mine!” sayeth the gallowboob.
Have you guys contacted law enforcement?
Given that the goal of this instance is to serve as a reference of the Fediverse, it is expected that it will continue to grow, and in turn, attract more attention, which due to a game of numbers also involves more trolls and enemies. Thus, the fact that the instance is being DDOS’ed right now shouldn’t be seen as a conjunctural problem, but rather a challenge that is here to stay and sometimes be a problem.
While I think it’s a good idea for lemmy.world to do it this time, relying on a police force to routinely come to our call and do something means periods during which the instance will be out while we wait for them for work. The instance, and Lemmy in general, should have more robust defenses so that calling for external help is only required at exceptional times.
I’d imagine that there are a lot of users and communities on here that want law enforcement as far away from the Fediverse as possible…
Lemmy isn’t a private space. It’s less private than Reddit in many regards.
I don’t see why when illegal things are happening the government’s offered services shouldn’t be made use of
aint no way
Lol
We’ll just have to nicely ask the ddos’ers to stop it then
I hate to break the illusion but cybersecurity experts already know about every Fediverse instance and it gets scanned regularly. Just like they do discord, FB, twitter, etc.
The Feds are everywhere son
Well… this is the fediverse after all.
I assure you that the FBI knew of lemmy and had watchers here before we hit 5 digit user numbers
Knowing someone in the FBI and how they talk about how antiquated it is, I have to vehemently disagree with you there.
I’m just curious, antiquated in what aspect?
In both technological and procedural advancement.
The risk that would create for vulnerable communities on here would deeply irresponsible.
Sounds like you and lefty are concerned with protecting illegal activity here? Fuck that. I’m not okay with Lemmy being a hub for society’s most trash individuals.
This isn’t 8chan, and I have no wish to see it emulate it. Revenge porn, CSAM, stalking and harassment: that absolutely should be kicked off and reported.
But if you can’t imagine a scenario where a left leaning, privacy focused userbase might look at willingly going to law enforcement without the above issues and balk, you need to review your history.
That’s not what we were implying remotely. The FBI is known to infiltrate left leaning political organizations to fuck with them. Obviously if someones hosting violence or CP or shit like that that’d awful and they need to be arrested, but I was specifying specifically about the FBIs history with fucking up political groups and forums
I jumped the gun then with assuming it was the latter. My b.
I believe it’s a mistake to conflate law-abiding with morally correct. In fact, in some cases the morally correct thing to do is disobey the law.
More and more every day.
I (foolishly) assumed we were talking about the obviously morally abhorrent stuff.
When the world has people killing each other for the “obviously” morally abhorrent stuff like wearing the wrong clothes… I’m afraid you need to specify.
Right. Because FBI doesn’t already monitor any suspicious activity.
Right. Because FBI doesn’t already monitor
any suspiciousactivity.FTFY
They fuck with left leaning groups and try to intentionally destabilize them 🤷♂️
It’s mostly right wing groups today. Left wing groups are just carebears these days.
I’m left. But what the fuck is the deal with “tankies” though? All of the sudden there are revolutionary communists (with no sense of the historical irony of this label) everywhere. I hadn’t even heard the term 6 months ago, it’s then all over Reddit, and suddenly I’m seeing people talk about violent revolution elsewhere on the lemmyfedi. I know part of it is the nature of the ‘verse, but is part of it that these people are the black box anarchists of yesteryear and I’m just behind the times?
They’re extremely online and outjerking each other in a feedback loop, and the moment you see one, chances are that you’re in a space where they’re overrepresented.
All of a sudden*
Fun fact: part of the goal of COINTELPRO is to make it so people accuse each other of being an agent provocateur
Other fun fact: another goal of it is to make it so people would accuse each other right back, completely destroying trust on all sides
Actually fun fact: this tactic is side agnostic and there are left wing plants under deep cover in right wing organizations from the fbi to the kkk specifically there to hinder their progress and damage their tactics
It’s fascinating to me that there are people who deeply understand and can effectively apply techniques of sowing discord within and between groups and fanning the flames without also making themselves the obvious source of the strife. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
Stop living in 1955.
Black Lives Matter and racial justice protestors would like a word.
They barely interfered with the BLM protests.
At the current place in time 15 people thought it was a good idea to downvote that post. That is also showing quite an obvious anti-left potential anti-liberal and US centric bias, which others for example BIPoCs would not share. Or whistleblowers.
The admins have access to that information btw. who upvotes and downvotes what. This means that closer connection to the FBI also makes it more easy for them to access the 100k+ users preferences, political leanings etc. as well as private messages. Other agencies wouldn’t even need to be involved with warrants to get that data, since the servers are harboring enough international communication that you ought to act as if intelligence agencies might have access to what you write, post and how you vote.
You do understand that upvotes and downvotes are public information?
You immediately categorizing anyone who disagrees with you as anti-left lost me immediately. People can just not agree with the points you’re making without some black/white agenda.
Oh no! Won’t anyone think of the criminals!?
First, they came for …
… the ciminals?
🙄
Florida is literally using social media to persecute people seeking medical care. Pull your head out of your ass.
I don’t understand.
As I said above, The FBI is known to infiltrate left leaning political organizations to fuck with them.
Well ok but they’re not going to do that because you asked them to investigate an attack.
Hi, 1974 called, they think your living in the wrong decade.
Are there any actual recent examples of this? Everything about lemmy is already completely open, so if they wanted to do anything, they would do it
And yet, and this will shock and amaze you, they’re probably here already. Lemmy isn’t a secret.
Found the fed… ;)
No doubt, but there’s a difference between a van trundling down the street and a welcome mat and a tray of tea cooling in the living room.
I get you. There’s good and bad in law enforcement, especially when it comes to tech and social media. On the one hand, there’s pretty serious crime happening online that needs to be stopped. On the other, wild invasions of privacy. There’s no easy answer at this point and governments obviously won’t police themselves.
Illegal activity is actually easier to track on the Fediverse than close source websites. Easy to program bots to run through open source code looking for it.
Why get a warrant when you can honey pot the entire thing? A trick as old as time.
Great explanation! And thanks for the many many hours you guys put in.
