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.

  • kadu@lemmy.world
    48·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • sadbehr@lemmy.nz
      3·
      2 years ago

      Damn I never thought about that. Lemmy.world has been a rock. And a transparent one at that, I love it.

      • samus12345@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        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!

    • BrisaLuna@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.

        • BrisaLuna@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 years ago

          Yep, even now. I had a really hard time (mentally) doing the transfer before, until I stumbled upon old LW. Still on this format, tbh, it’s just more compact for me. I’m thinking that other lazier / lurkier users might get encouraged to make the jump if the place is familiar to what they will leave behind. Of course, there is still a learning curve, but since everything looked a little bit like the old R, it was intuitive enough for me.

          I’m forced to shift to the usual formatting when I have to switch to sh.itjust.works because of the downtime, but when i go back to lemmy.world, it’s always on the old format mode.

          And I am a bit talkative here, as I read that lurking doesn’t really help the fediverse. Wish I can contribute in a more intellectual content-making kind of way, but as I don’t have expertise (only interest), my only contribution is to add activity.

          • gears@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            2 years ago

            old.lemmy.world is just running mlmym, btw. There is another one running at mlmym.org, where you can use any instance. Or you can run the software yourself if desired.

            • Malisu19997@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              2 years ago

              Could also maybe pitch the idea of an old style interface to the sh.itjust.works maintainers, that way they’d have one built-in to the site itself just like it is on lemmy.world.

    • TheAndrewBrown@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • danielton@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • samus12345@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      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).

      • sfgifz@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        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?

        • samus12345@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          Yeah, really. I get why some instances want to be selective, but it was a bit jarring to me just how many were when I was looking for a way to try Lemmy out.

        • EssentialCoffeeEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          Honestly, my instance had that, and was also going through downtime growing pains from the influx of users, so I had to submit multiple times.

          ‘I’m from Reddit trying to find a new home’ and ‘I like coffee’ are not what I’d call an essay or a casting couch personally, but to each their own.

        • jarfil@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 years ago

          If you call a couple sentences “an essay”… what are you even doing writing “essays” in random comments while taking a dump?

        • qaz@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 years ago

          Especially if you have no clue what it’s about and just want to check it out

        • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
          0·
          2 years ago

          It literally takes ten seconds and it’s an easy way to filter out bots.

          lemmy.ca had semi-closed invites and I just wrote that I was migrating away from reddit and wanted to join a local instance as a Canadian. It was like two sentences and I got approved in under an hour.

          • sfgifz@lemmy.world
            0·
            2 years ago

            Sure, you’re not wrong. But a ton of genuine users are simply checking out what this Lemmy thing is at this stage, and asking them to elaborate why they want to be here, even if in a few lines, is going to turn them away. Instances should be allowed to enforce this if they want, I just think there should be a way for users to quickly find a less restrictive instance. This is what turned me away from Lemmy in my early attempt to use it - I just wanted to check it out on whim and was told there’s a manual approval.

            I don’t even agree that this is a good way to keep out bad bots. We already have farms where you just hire someone in a country with cheap labor to just create accounts all day.

            • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
              0·
              2 years ago

              I think it becomes a problem on larger instances that don’t have the manpower to manually read and flag users, which would definitely be the place that .world is in. .ca is a much smaller instance and it’s still feasible to do stuff like this by hand.

              I don’t think .world would benefit from implementing a check, all things considered though. The easier it is to onboard to the fediverse the better we’ll all be in the long run, even if it’s concentrated in a few central places.

        • anon6789@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 years ago

          Everyone complaining about the Beehaw registration is what got me to check it out.

          It was certainly not an “essay,” just pretty much a paragraph saying I’m not a bot or troll and in a few minutes I was approved. This was maybe 2 weeks after the Reddit protest, so it may have been worse initially, but my signup was painless.

          I have a few accounts to see how the first few months will go with defederations go, but most instances I go to look much the same at this point. I like the feel of Beehaw best and I’d say it’s my primary right now, but the defederation and signup does seem to have slowed growth.

          World is my second most used, and I still check out new instances, but between those 2 the majority of my needs are covered right now. I think it’s cool you can get different “flavors” of Lemmy, so everyone doesn’t have to like all the instances, but most of them seen to play well together.

          I just don’t understand the need to rip on the ones doing things differently when that is one of the features of the Fediverse. I don’t even like seeing people trash EH or LG because it’s free advertising to new people they exist. I don’t want to see feeds listed with their names, and the complaining is just an attraction to people who actually want that garbage.

        • Rootiest@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          Weird, I just wrote something like:

          I left reddit for Lemmy and am experimenting with different instances. I felt I agreed with the philosophy here and wanted to create an account

    • PaulDevonUK@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • Countmacula@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        It’s self moderating only to a degree. Anybody can make their own community on lemmyworld, and post whatever they like. Any report you make against a bad community can get you banned from it because they can see who reported what.

        So the only way to deal with a bad community is to get side-wide admins involved, which is not a quick process.

      • BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Nah. It comes from the possibility of being held personally liable for any illegal content hosted on your instance. No one running a small instance wants to get thrown in jail because some other instance isn’t moderating effectively when that content gets federated to their local database.

        It’s a real fear that I haven’t seen many people address yet.

      • cybervseas@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I think that instance hosts were/are more worries about moderating illegal content like CP, copyrighted works, etc. where just blocking isn’t enough. Rather content may actually need to be deleted from the server to avoid legal liability.

    • Capt. Wolf@lemmy.world
      01·
      2 years ago

      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…

      • antonim@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • DarkWasp@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 years ago

          I agree with all of the points you made, there’s nothing wrong with certain instances or communities gearing themselves towards particular interests or demographics (like more tech savvy people, longer replies, etc like old school forums).

          Also a little taken aback by the misuse of the word xenophobia which doesn’t make much sense in the context it was used in.

        • EmperorOfTexas@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          I don’t want all of Reddit to come flooding in all at once.

          But one thing I’ve noticed is that the entire Fediverse has a lot of instance-specific stuff going on. It’s really a question of finding the right instance for you. For example, I didn’t particularly like mastodon.social as an instance of Mastodon, but I’ve found other instances where I gel with the userbase well. It’s actually made the experience more pleasant.

          If you’re willing and able, setting up a Lemmy instance for some specific community is actually a good idea. During my holiday break, I’m going to be working on setting up Lemmy for my town and maybe even a club website that I have been assigned control over. .world will suffice in the interim.

  • LemmyLefty@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • eek2121@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • SuddenDownpour@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • LemmyLefty@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 years ago

      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…

    • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Did it result in charges for the person doing it?

      For this, I want to see the motivation for DDOSing Lemmy lol.

      • eek2121@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        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.

      • pips@lemmy.filmEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        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.

      • gabe [he/him]@literature.cafe
        0·
        2 years ago

        There was a user who made hundreds of communities and got pissy when they were banned, there’s heavy speculation that it’s them.

            • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
              0·
              2 years ago

              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.

              • Gullible@lemmy.world
                0·
                2 years ago

                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.

              • Lemdee@lemmy.world
                0·
                2 years ago

                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

          • MudSkipperKisser@lemmy.world
            0·
            2 years ago

            This was honestly my first thought. Highly unlikely I’m sure but they’re not winning any awards for good decisions lately

        • Meldroc@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          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.

          • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            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.

        • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          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.

  • SloppyPuppy@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    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!

  • Demigodrick@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Ah no, sorry, while I sympathise with your technical issues, the rest of your post is disingenuous at best.

    Lemmy.world being too big is bad for Lemmy as a product/software/“brand” etc - your downtime, being the instance most people link to, is a LOT of people’s first impression and when it spends time being down, people associate THAT downtime with Lemmy, and not the hundreds of other instances that don’t have downtime.

    The issue isn’t even about you being the biggest instance, its the absolute imbalance in both users and communities on one instance and you willingly allowing it continue. If you genuinely cared about Lemmy, you would close registrations now.

    You have enough “technical” people to build your own instance from the source code with that change for the banner built in (and you could go ahead and submit the PR/Issue anyway), but you haven’t - instead placing the blame on the developers. Hell, you only made the PR 5 hours ago after weeks of other admins asking you to close the instance.

    You could even make the simple change to the sign up link instead lead to join-lemmy, but for whatever reason you want to continue to be the biggest instance and don’t care about the wider lemmy ecosystem and the effect that it has.

      • Demigodrick@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        While I appreciate that, the issues caused by lemmy.world to many other admins can be monumental. If the instance goes down, it causes many people to wonder why federation has stopped working, despite the fact the home server is fine. All that content in one place is not only against the point of federation, its a risk to the existence of lemmy if the owner just decided to walk away tomorrow. While im sure he wont, and im sure many users would try to recreate or move communities elsewhere if he did, a large core percentage of lemmy wouldnt come back, and that is the risk.

        As I said, I sympathise with their technical issues, hell this instance has had hours of downtime because of SQL queries, but claiming they aren’t too big is not a valid response. Just because imbalanced instances happens elsewhere doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue here, especially because of the problems with the back end.

        Their refusal to acknowledge the complete imbalance, or to do anything about it, is IMO an actual problem for lemmy.

        Ps it’s OK to disagree with me, but I’d rather people explain why than just downvote. Can’t have a proper discussion with a downvote.

        • Atrabiliousaurus@reddthat.com
          0·
          2 years ago

          I made an account on lemmy.world because as I understand it you only see posts from communities on other instances if you or someone else on your instance has subscribed to them. So it seems like if you want the best lemmy experience you should join the largest instance, perhaps if that wasn’t the case more people would be willing to move to smaller instances.

        • deadinside91@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 years ago

          I downvoted your other post because while yes, in an ideal situation people migrating from Reddit would join local instances that fit their individual values the best, I don’t agree that forcing people to join other instances than .world is the right or that it will make Lemmy better.

          It doesn’t matter if the reason is because they read about in a guide, it has most of the communities they liked, or even because it’s the biggest instance currently, people’s freedom of choice should be respected. How do you think complete newcomers would see Lemmy if even the most recommended instance turns them away? Probably that the whole thing is very exclusive.

          The general sentiment around here seems to be that people like how the admins are handling things so far and that they feel inclined to be more active because there is enough users to generate discussions on smaller topics as well, so your claim that this instance is somehow damaging Lemmy’s image seems a bit disingenuous to be honest.

        • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
          0·
          2 years ago

          I don’t see how their number of users is a legitimate problem. If it was causing issues due to day-to-day usage causing problematic queries that would be one thing, but it’s been made clear that this is not a day-to-day issue with numbers, it’s an active attack issue that’s exploiting those heavy queries. It’s not like the number of users are causing a hug-of-death style DDOS by calling the aforementioned queries.

          If the users are a problem, it’s only due to people being basically jealous of the user count on .world and picking it as the chief instance to fuck with, like picking the biggest guy in the jail lunchroom to prove you’re a badass.

  • ieightpi@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    Ive been waiting for this response from you guys. You have been a fantastic admin team so far. I still don’t agree with some of the de-federating, but overall you guys truly show you care about this instance and the lemmy fediverse as a whole.

    I know I wont be wavering because of butt hurt idiots in other instances. I will hold my ground and stick to Lemmy.World.

    Keep it up and i hope that in due time, you guys can keep the DDOS attacks under control.

      • daddyrat@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        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.

      • dragontamer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        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.