1y ago

Lemmy World outages

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.

534 comments

What I find most ridiculous about people claiming lemmy.world is too big and therefore bad for the Fediverse is simply... Have you people wondered why it got so big?
During the crucial first weeks of the Reddit migration, the single time period with the most chance of bringing new users, pretty much all larger Lemmy instances closed their registrations - they couldn't handle the influx. Other big ones decided to immediately defederate everybody, they were afraid of having to moderate content. And a few did remain open and federated, but they were also extremely niche and focused on their own political side of the spectrum.
Lemmy.world however remained open, remained with active admins that helped the first moderators, and kept upgrading the server at a very fast rate - you might forget it now, but Lemmy was massively slow and frustrating and then a new Lemmy.world update would drop and it would feel like a different website.
So yeah, "bad for the Fediverse" for being the only instance that kept up with the demand at the most necessary time.
Thanks Lemmy.world team.
- Damn I never thought about that. Lemmy.world has been a rock. And a transparent one at that, I love it.
  
  So, a diamond 💎
  
  Something about living long enough and becoming the villain...
  EDIT: Phew, my age is showing trying to use a meme phrase! This didn't convey what I intended. I meant to say that .world has been unfairly vilified by some. Will be more judicious in using this phrase in the future!
- I'm convinced now that people saying something is "Bad for the fediverse" is just their ignorance and xenophobia showing.
  Look at the shitposting or lemmy memes going around and you'll see a lot of people are actually afraid of users coming from reddit and spoiling the experience here.
  I'm sure others don't want us growing because, consciously or unconsciously, they won't have as much traction or get as much attention. More people means you have less of a voice.
  We can't argue about federation on the net, avoiding corporate control, or whatever while sticking our hand out and stopping people from joining. It just doesn't work that way.
  People complaining about the size of a social media platform are missing the point of a social media platform...
  
  This is the first time in my life I've seen dislike of the userbase of an another site called 'xenophobia'.
  Especially weird since 90% of Lemmy is fresh off reddit themselves.
  Personally I just don't want the shitty aspects of the reddit community seeping over here. It's a fact that reddit userbase has been facebookised, to the degree where I frequently see people who are outright stupid (repeatedly posting threads to wrong subreddits, ignoring mod messages, unable to comprehend basic English... stuff that I'd expect to see on Facebook and not reddit), or focused on memes and quips to the point where any discussion is flooded with such moronic content. There's still (at least) tens of thousands of people on reddit who I'm sure would be great contributors on Lemmy too if they decide to switch, and I hope they will. But I don't want all of reddit here. Is that really so bad, to not want to look at unfiltered normie crap? Reddit was good (if it ever was good) precisely because it was a bit elitist in its design and its culture.
  We can’t argue about federation on the net, avoiding corporate control, or whatever while sticking our hand out and stopping people from joining.
  Maybe people can join somewhere else too? Make a Fediverse equivalent of Facebook/Instagram or something. Lemmy is not all of Fediverse and doesn't have to be for everyone.
  Like half of your complaints are literally good things. Yes, people want to be heard and not practically hidden from 90% if they don't get enough upvotes on their post/comment during the crucial early time frame, as on bigger reddit subs. Lemmy is not a social media platform anyway, its goal is not to facilitate socialisation among the users and it doesn't need many millions of users to work well.
- It upsets me that people can't understand this. Lemmy was getting hit like crazy. Even through all that, it was better than reddit. I adore lemmy and the .world admins. I seriously can't wait to see it grow.
- And besides closing registrations, many others required that you request it, then wait for approval. Of course most went with the path of least resistance - I know I did (using an alt account now because of the DDOS attacks).
  
  Aahh please write an essay about why you'd like to join our server and why you chose your username. Who tf wants to go through a casting couch for an app you'll use while taking a dump?
- Now you put it that way, thank you lemmy world. I probably wouldn't migrate out of R itself if I didn't see your site and made it look familiar. Transition had been easy for me and now, I barely go back there unless via libreddit.
  
  made it look familiar
  Are you using https://old.lemmy.world?
- 292 instances listed for the first 9 days this month! That's over 33 per day.
  You guys are in the middle of a huge battle. I wish I could assist but it's outside my experience.
- Could not be stated any better.
- I definitely think the lemmy.world admins have done everything right so far. I’m not sure if there are actually people saying it’s bad for the fediverse but the sentiment I see is that consolidating onto one instance causes you to lose some of the benefits of decentralization. At this point, there are plenty of general instances with open registrations that aren’t experiencing these attacks so it’s best for at least some people on lemmy.world to try to migrate to another instance. For one thing, that persons experience will be better since they won’t see as much downtime anymore, but more importantly it makes lemmy.world less of a target since these attacks are meant to affect as many people as they can. It’ll probably always be one of the biggest instances but the person might decide it’s not worth their time anymore if enough people move to other instances that they’re affecting a small percentage of the whole Lemmy population.
  
  I’m not sure if there are actually people saying it’s bad for the fediverse
  Oh there are plenty of people claiming this. I actually started with a small instance but moved here due to lack of content that the smaller instance could see.
  One of Lemmy's shortcomings is that, by default, instances are only aware of local communities and the specific communities that its users have deliberately subscribed to. If a user subscribes to !funny@lemmy.world for example, the instance does not scan lemmy.world for more communities. There are some small instances running federation helper bots to fix this, but I ended up here due to the lack of visible content on the small instance. Yes, I know there are directories of Lemmy communities, but initiating a federation request on a small instance is not intuitive.
- This is one of those "crisis of opportunity" moments. We're witnessing the start of something new.

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.
- 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…
  
  And yet, and this will shock and amaze you, they're probably here already. Lemmy isn't a secret.
  
  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.
  
  aint no way
  
  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
  
  Lol
  
  We'll just have to nicely ask the ddos'ers to stop it then
  
  The Feds are everywhere son
  
  The risk that would create for vulnerable communities on here would deeply irresponsible.
- 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.
- Did it result in charges for the person doing it?
  For this, I want to see the motivation for DDOSing Lemmy lol.
  
  There was a user who made hundreds of communities and got pissy when they were banned, there's heavy speculation that it's them.
  
  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.
  
  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.

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.

Im a data engineer with 20+ years of experience in sql and various databases, I do performance tuning on daily basis. How can I help? Please message me if you think you can use me. Id be very happy to help where I can!
- Possibly not ideal for you as a data engineer, but you could try skimming down the GitHub database issues?
  
  Id rather someone just point me to the problematic query obviously. Would be much easier and better use of my time than to run my own instance and fake data into tables to see where the bottle neck is …
  
  Fixed Link
  EDIT: Kinda fixed? Is Lemmy stripping special characters? Is it my app client (Memmy)?
- People like you are the saviors
- If you can start poking around in their GitHub.
- I have huge respect for data engineers. Talk about unsung heroes. Thank you for everything you do.
  Oracle gives me a headache thinking about it and once things get complicated with an enormous amount of tables and data, I leave it to people who know better. I will go back to programming PLCs, explaining how a warehouse control system works, and writing code in too many languages at once. That is my happy place. The big bad database can stay over there while I make machinery do my bidding.
  
  Oh sure, these people get a couple of lonely hearts to have lunch or dinner together a few times, maybe go out to a movie or a show, and then what? Arranged marriages? -- oh wait. That's "data" engineer ... never mind.
  
  Bruh
- If you're serious about this, there's a post up calling for sysops: https://lemmy.world/post/2769245
  It's somewhat of a commitment, rather than drop-in drop-out... but that's what it takes to make a difference here. There are already several sharp and experienced database engineers working on the Lemmy world team. The problem is that the site is under repeated denial of service attack, and there isn't one bad query to fix... each time one query gets addressed, the attackers move on to a new one.
  While it's always possible that someone has missed a silver bullet, it's much more likely that a a series of ongoing independent mitigations and optimizations are needed to achieve a tipping point where lemmy is more or less protectable with some hidden dos-able bits rather than more or less trivially dos-able everywhere.

Besides the actual developers of lemmy, none has done more for the lemmiverse than the maintainers of lemmy.word. When the Reddit shitstorm started and other leading servers shut down user registration, you guys held the ship steady and didn’t flinch from the sudden flood of new users. Discovering new bottle-necks in lemmy code, helping to resolve them and deploying hot fixes. All in super fast reaction time. About “lemmy.world shouldn’t be largest server” crap - it’s good for lemmy that one server is the easy entry point to lemmy. This is where the “mainstream” communities could/should be and new users will have an easier landing. Having dedicated servers with their own communities (like start trek, piracy, etc) is great but it’s not mandatory for all communities.
- Hey! Lemmy.dbzer0.com stayed open as well! :)
  
  🫡
  
  You definitely did!
- I did this before in this thread but there are actually some others who helped us quite a bit. Lemm.ee's admin @sunaurus@lemm.ee and Lemmy contributor @phiresky@lemmy.world to name a few.
  
  Yeah I read the original announcement. I know it was a team effort. But still, this is your sever and your responsibility.
- The main issues I have with Lemmy.world is basically how culturally tied to Reddit some users are, and I just want to get away from that.
  I hang out on smaller instances because there's less people trying to uphold reddit standards and BS. Stuff like keeping track of defederations, but then claiming they're all based around some drama. Stuff like that is ultimately unhealthy for the site and was a root cause of reddit becoming more and more toxic over time.
  
  Lemmy is more or less a Reddit clone , at least in how users interact with the site/apps. The more people migrate, the more this will happen. Admittedly, that’s why I’m here but I’m not sure what you mean by upholding Reddit standards. Reddit was/is community operated and minus reddits moderation, the users here will shape the future of the site regardless of the instance in the same way. Subs get too big , and create more serious or niche ones, until those get too big.
  /r/gaming and r/games come to mind as an example
- It's also good that these attacks are being leveled at an instance with enough technical talent, time, and money to deal with them. My understanding is that what's happening to LW could happen at ANY Lemmy instance. Assuming that's true whoever is doing this could crush smaller instances that are unable to deal with it.

Y'all are motherfucking gangsters. Appreciate the work you're putting in. I don't do your kind of code or I'd pitch in. Much love. ♥️

Imagine having the free time to engineer attacks on a site. Fucking loser.
- Or, they have a commercial interest or are paid by someone who does. Fucking losers either way
  
  I've got my bets on who it is.
  As the post pointed out: these are people who know how Lemmy works. There's a few troll-websites that have been defederated from Lemmy.world, and those troll-websites (and culture) is well known to retaliate in the form of DDOS attacks.
  It sucks, but we shouldn't let them bully us. Instead, we can go to https://sh.itjust.works/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world and... hey look, bringing down Lemmy.world temporarily doesn't actually stop us from talking or sharing our posts?
  They're relying upon the fact that people are "used to" going to https://lemmy.world and don't know that every single member of the federation (sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ca, etc. etc. etc.) all serve as backups to Lemmy.world proper. The posts nor server is ever really down.
- It's called "kids on vacation". Unless they're getting paid.
- Having free time makes you a loser?
  
  No, spending your free time shitting on other people’s efforts for no reason makes you a loser. Doing it anonymously from the shadows (so to speak) doubly so.
  
  No, but wilful misunderstanding does.

I couldnt care less. You provide a great forum at no charge to me. I thank yoy for your contribution to discourse, communication with the community, and look forward to the growth of lemmy.world

Thanks for being so transparent with us. Lemmy really does feel like home now to me. I wish the maintainers all the best as they continue to fight the forces of evil.

Reddit was down a lot too, and they stuck ads in my face. It’s not like I have a pacemaker that needs Lenny.world to be up in order to function. Keep up the good work and I hope whoever is behind the attacks steps on a Lego.

Thank you for your work 🫡

usually my reaction when a website I visit daily goes down is to probably visit that website less or think the backend team behind it is lazy. but when lemmy.world goes down or is under attack, I sympathize and just open it when it's back up. y'all prove that you're hardworking by providing clear communication and explanation on what's happening everytime. shout out lemmy team, you deserve the world!!

Have you guys tried NOT getting attacked? Might work.
Seriously, thanks for all your effort!

Have you heard of something called The Cloud? It sounds possible this will solve all of our issues!
(/s in case it's not terribly obvious.)
- Blockchain!
  
  No no they need Ai generated NFTs
- Just download more RAM bro

I think you should take 5% of donations to pay yourselves personally. I appreciate your work!
- 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.
- I would be happy to support a special fundraiser to get the admins some beers.

Great stuff, thank you for all the good work.
btw, as a tip: please resize https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/14f857e5-703a-4513-9c1a-f23031675be1.png in an image editor. It's on the homepage, and it's a frikking 4.5 megabyte image file.

What else can we do to help Lemmy.world besides donate?
- Asking for nothing but patience :)
  
  Here you go.
  And before Pipedbot comes in and berates me for not using it, I just wanna say Calm Down.
- Doesn't seem like even that would help. Patience seems to be the most useful option right now.
  
  Definitely won't HURT though
- If you got any programming skills, Lemmy's code is open source and improvements to these expensive calls (or just any call) would most likely help the server. I'm also sure moderation tools would probably make their job easier and just improvements to the platform as a whole would probably help (more users, more possible donations, especially if it gets closer to platforms like reddit)
  But without any technical skills like that, probably just helping communicate stuff like this, like if someone's complaining, explaining this, is probably the best you can do (and it ain't much)

Cheers for the good work guys

Thanks for the update and the hard work behind the scenes to keep things online!

If you think it might help I've got a bit of a hack I've used in the past to cache a sql database in a compressed ramdisk using zram and bcache. Imagine stuffing a 50G DB into 20G of memory.
It won't fix the inefficient SQL queries but it would make it so frequently accessed tables get cached in a ram disk cutting query time significantly.
This might be enough to reduce the impact of these attacks until queries can be optimized.
This assumes your database isn't running on something like RDS though.

Ah so the Lemmy World server isn’t a Raspberry Pie? Nice.

I'm sure they don't want to reveal to much but I'm curious if the attackers were authenticated. If not it seems reasonable to rate limit anonymous users.

Love this transparency post and info, much appreciated

I have to wonder why expensive SQL queries in Lemmy operations even exist. As Lemmy scales, won't those queries get executed more often just as part of normal operation? That would say to me that the Lemmy software needs optimization. Otherwise there will be scaling issues even if the attacks stop.
- the version number is 0.18.4 that should give you a hint.
  it's entirely possible that these simply haven't been optimized yet.
  
  The version number is 0.18.4
  That's fascinating, I would have expected it to be more like 1.18.4-beta. I thought zeros were meant for unreleased product.
- That's exactly what is happening now. Lemmy is a very young codebase and up until very recently only had a tiny user base, so optimisation wasn't that important.
  Over the last few months the Devs have been working hard to improve things, but there is a lot of ground to cover
  
  I wonder whether writing the backend in Rust was a premature optimization in its own right in that case. Lemmy can be seen as a fairly simple CRUD app whose work is mostly in the database, plus some network communications with federated instances.
- The devs aren't DB experts (no harm in saying this), as for example a while ago someone spotted an SQL query where Lemmy used to do filtering after a huge join, instead of joining after filtering. SQL experts need to help them here.
  
  I'm not an expert either unfortunately, but using EXPLAIN on slow queries can go a long way.
  The most demystifying documents I know of about SQL query planning are actually from SQLite. Understanding them can help figure out how to optimize SQL in general, since they explain how SQL execution engines work:
  https://sqlite.org/optoverview.html
  https://sqlite.org/opcode.html
  
  I'm pretty good with SQL... well I used to be, been using a noSql db for a while now.
  but is there a list somewhere of the worst queries?
  I'm too busy to contribute to a project rn but I can optimise queries.
- It sucks but there will always be some labor intensive queries to execute. Although, it can be limited and restricted which I'm sure they are already on top of it. Such as caching and security control put in place to make limits like "this type of request from this IP can only happen 1x per hour" or something along those lines.
  If I had to guess, without looking into the source code yet and limited information provided I'd assuming it's mass account creation, image uploading and/or exploiting how the instant syncs with the fediverse. It's most certainly something that can be mostly prevented once the holes are made and then patched.
  Also, I'm sure in the future something more efficient than SQL will be used.
  
  I have to wonder what those queries actually do. Why is mass account creation a thing? Image uploading shouldn't cause significant db activity (add a row saying where the image is, don't put the image into a BLOB or anything like that). Syncing is no big deal either, given the quite low amount of traffic. I know that some websites use Postgres for fulltext search and I don't know how well that works under heavy loads. I've mostly used Solr (solr.apache.org, thus my username) but I think that is now considered old fashioned.
  PostgreSQL itself is quite performant and should be able to handle high loads once the queries and schemas are optimized, there is some caching of obvious things, etc. One antipattern I've noticed is pagination: saying "page=5" like Lemmy does to get to the 5th page of /all is done with an OFFSET clause which is expensive because it has to count off that many rows. It is better to use timestamps or other markers like Reddit does, that can be an indexed column that can be accessed quickly.
  Anyway thanks.
- Thank you Dudes for all your hard work!
- There really needs to be a SQL result caching layer as well wherever possible. Even caching things a couple seconds in redis would help mitigate ddos issues. Things like counter updates could be batched in a queue to rate limit.This is pretty basic stuff for crafting a scalable site so it seems Lemmy really needs more experienced volunteer help on the codebase.
  
  Disclaimer: I'm probably behind the times.
  It wouldn't surprise me if that type of Redis caching is still done, but it seems like an antipattern since PG has plenty of caching in its own right. In the old days, the Redis or Memcached layer was because you just couldn't get cost-effective servers with more than 32GB of ram, and SSD's weren't really a thing, so if you had 500GB of assets and didn't want to serve from HDD, you'd use a memcached or redis cluster to serve from ram. These days ram and big servers are a lot more affordable, and SSD decreases DB latency by a lot, so you don't need such kludges as much.
  I don't think Wikipedia uses a Redis layer but I could be wrong. My impression is that it has a lot of squid proxies to serve statically cached pages to viewers who are not logged in. For logged in users the pages are customized and generated dynamically from mysql queries. I believe they do have a large number of mysql slave servers to distribute those queries among, though.
  I'm sure Ruud knows a lot more about PG than I do, so hopefully he and the devs are on top of this stuff.
- The Lemmy core devs have long ago admitted they're no SQL experts, and were asking for help. Some people have offered some, but much more is needed.

I found that LMAO/Angled (guy who was angry about being banned for community name squatting) has a YouTube that does techy stuff, he's always in the back of my mind as someone who could be contributing to the DDoS, total speculation though but the threat of "ruining your site" and then coming back to spam the trending communities with spam makes me suspicious lol

Cmon half the users here are tech nerds, get to work you lazy bastards, I'll be there as soon as I close this sprint--

Thanks for all you guys do! While the lack of reliability can be frustrating your efforts do not go unnoticed. Thanks again.

They are inadvertently helping Lemmy become more robust
- 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.

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.

A fantastic job is being done by you folks - obviously in the face of adversity. Given the amount of users on the instance is at a critical point, would it not be possible to 'move' accounts off it onto other less populated instances ?
Keep up the great work folks - I sympathise for ya.

Thank you for the update. Good work.

Take your time bros I don't need this shit 24/7 the downtime is fine and expected

I guess it's that guy who said he was going to break the site. Remember that guy? Something about not being allowed to open loads of communities or something.
- Lemmy getting "one guy"-d is such a story, and I do believe it. Petty assholes doing shit has hapenned a couple times, hell, just this week, Valve had to basically nuke half their Dota 2 Arcade because one guy started filing GDPR complaints after he checks notes* didn't get a stupid discord icon. It's always like this. The "one guy" always has the dumbest, pathetic motivation.

I was wondering why the CloudFlare protection doesn't work, this makes sense. Does CF have any point then? Lots of people don't like it.
It's weird someone would spend so much time to target LW. Ah well.

I’m imagining spez is sending his flying monkeys and they’ve been trying to shut it all down. Doesn’t matter that you’re smaller than Reddit, Egos like spez’s can’t take even a minor rumble. Just look at how he has to ‘win’ against all his own users. Should tell you all you need to know on his motives.

Thank you for everything you do. You guys are doing a fantastic job, and a lot of us sincerely appreciate all your efforts!

Thanks for the transparency and the update! Downtime to me is useful, it prevents me from using Lemmy too much.

Glad you guys resisted the call to close signups. I think that's what they want in the end, to harm lemmy.world by killing it's growth.

I wonder if reddit, the company, are the ones ddosing.

You guys are trying your best, and that's what matters. Thank you LW Team.

Thank you for your time & efforts in maintaining this platform. I (and many others I'm sure) have great respect for the work you do in trying to combat this menace. The community is completely behind you and appreciates the value of this resource.

Thank you for your hard work

I hope you don't get burned out, I'm thinking that's the plan. That, and everyone else getting sick of the downtime will make everyone leave. This instance is the most like Reddit for me and I think that it's similar to many. Thanks for explaining it and I appreciate what you do.

Come on ddosers, we can always solve our differences with dialogue
- That looks a lot like an autoexec.bat
  
  What would a config.sys look like, then?
- Dialogue Tool for the Gacha Player
  
  Finally a fellow genshin player. Where are the genshin communities on lemmy 😭
  
  persuasion with reason
- Suddenly Portuguese.

Very grateful for your focus and dedication. Bummer about the DDOS bullshit. Your efforts mean a lot to the communities.

You're managing this well. Good work folks.

Another heartfelt thanks—both for the hard work, and for the transparency.

In a way, the ddos attacks are helping highlight the slow parts of the system causing a reason to optimise them? It's kind of a double edged sword
- What doesn't kill you makes you stronger I guess.
- Yeah good point. They are just stress testing, for free. Legends.
- It is far more likely that they were already aware of the slow parts of the system. You don't normally write a slow query by accident (if you have any amount of real experience), and even if you do it's readily visible in any basic logging and profiling system

Thank you guys for the write up and for helping to keep things running.

In terms of the "expensive" SQL queries - is this an issue that the lemmy devs are working on? I.e. is this a problem that might solve itself in time?

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