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Welp that answers a lot of why all .ml are down (i.imgur.com)
submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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https://very.bignutty.xyz/notes/9hf13it1ced3b2za

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[–] 97 points 3 years ago (49 children)

Man, hacking, DDOS and now this. The fediverse just can't catch a break...

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  • [–] 77 points 3 years ago (12 children)

    Resiliency is the strongpoint.

    If Reddit shuts down, all of Reddit dies.

    Same with Facebook, YouTube, etc. is that highly unlikely? Well, yeah, but still nonzero. The fediverse offers resiliency in this regard, and no one person has the ability to shut it down. Even if all instances decide to shut down, new instances can still be spun up.

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  • [–] 39 points 3 years ago (11 children)

    If the communities you like to read and post to are down, then Fediverse is effectively down for you. Thus it doesn't offer any additional resilience, it's not a P2P system.

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  • [–] 21 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Stuff like technology has multiple big communities, I can go to the one on .ml .world or beehaw and still get a lot of content

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I haven’t learnt all about account federation - through who are you authored to write a comment here with a .ml account? Where are you logged in from?

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Just because anti-lock brakes fail to work in all scenarios doesn't mean they're not still an improvement.

    Lemmy is still up for most people. That is resilience. If you are affected by this outage, then it failed for you in this particular case but that doesn't mean the mechanisms don't exist and that they won't work to your advantage in the future.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    True but if you have several interests, hopefully spread over several instances, then there is resilience because if one server crashes, you have at least some other things trucking along.

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  • [–] 36 points 3 years ago (33 children)

    Would help if users spread out over all the running servers because problem is just a few lemmy servers have all the users. For example the instance I run would be a simple proxy to use for all the content and then would mitigate issues when a big server had problems since just parts of the fediverse would be affected from the users pov.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 years ago (16 children)

    I feel like communities are the bigger problem here. And not one that's easily solved.

    If users from multiple instances come together in communities, those communities are still centralized on a single server. So if something happens to that server, or if your instance defederates with it, the whole community goes with it.

    The alternative would be to have tons of duplicate communities spread over many instances, but that's a bad user experience.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    I think it can continue even without the source server? Like, once I press the Reply button on this comment, it gets saved to my instance (lemmings.world) then it lets all the other instances know, including lemmy.world (where the community is hosted) and slrpnk.net where you are registered.

    Now let's say lemmy.world stops existing, my instance still would let all the other instances it federates with know, meaning you could read my reply on a community that basically no longer exists. Though I'm pretty sure there are downsides to that (like, what if all the mods were from lemmy.world? There's no admin who can add a new mod).

    At least that's what I think it works like.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    meaning you could read my reply on a community that basically no longer exists

    oh really? does it actually work this way? if lemmy.world dies, can all its communities continue to live on as long as there are lemmy instances out there federated and subscribed?

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    No. You would only ever be interacting with a snapshot-at-the-time-of-death of the community on your local instance only. It is the home instance of the community that federates all events, not the instance of the originating post/comment/vote/whathaveyou.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    Ah, ok. So if lemmy.world dies, but !somecommunity@lemmy.world was federated to 2 different other instances, those instances wouldn't be able to "talk to each other"? They'd just have snapshots that they could locally interact with, but never see anything else? So is the fate of the Lemmyverse a graveyard of communities from dead instances?

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago*

    I wonder about this as well -- because communities are tied to a specific home instance, that instance going down affects that community, potentially killing it. Something more akin to hashtags/tags/labels wouldn't be tied to an instance so they would be more robust, though you'd lose the moderation of a community and just have a firehose of posts/comments...

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Wow, you're right. We really need to bring back something like USENET, where newsgroups (their "communities") weren't tied to a specific server. We could almost just resurrect NNTP, although the handling of images (and binary data more generally) probably needs some tweaking.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    Jesum Crow... Tags aren't a new concept. Just group communities with a tag... is that incredibly complicated to implement or something?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    There needs to be a way for a person or group to essentially own a tag to enable moderation. It might be one of those rare problems for which a block chain is a good solution, because there would need to be a public ledger showing who is a moderator for a tag at any given moment.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    There is no need to own a tag, nor to tack blockchain into a problem to try and sell a solution. Ever.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    You seem confused about what block chains actually are. I'm not suggesting anyone sell anything.

    And if you think moderation isn't needed for healthy online communities, I invite you to visit Twitter.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    It doesn’t have to be a bad ue though. The concept of multi-communities would make it easier to see communities based on topic.

    And having a search automation that find like communities, even if just the same community name on different instances would really go a long way.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    At this stage in the game, I'm not even sure how to evaluate the trustworthiness of instances. Which also applies to the one I'm currently on. I'd like to assume everything is good, but admins do have power that can be abused, like visibility of IP addresses, access to accounts, access to passwords (reusing passwords is bad but especially don't do it here and certainly don't use the same password for your email associated with your account).

    Facebook abused those powers (zuck even bragged about being able to see everyone's passwords, emails, private messages, pictures), so did Reddit (though more with shadow banning or quietly removing/restoring posts).

    Fediverse instances are just run by random people as far as I can tell. I'm sure there's some that should absolutely be avoided and I'm sure that there's some that are perfectly fine. But I don't have a clue how to determine which list about specific instance is in, otherwise I'd love to join someone's small instance.

    Edit: oh and that only goes into whether the admin is acting in good faith or intends to be abusive. Then there's the question of whether the admin is competent enough to run a server without it getting pwnt and giving others access to that same information and capabilities.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (10 children)

    the problem is most users fear that if they choose a small instance, that it goes down random more likely and their account and everything else is gone. if you choose a bigger instance it feels less likely that the admin of the instance just says fuck it and kills the server random for whatever reason.

    as long accounts can't be easy transfered and are maybe even safe somehow without their instance, people will choose the instance that feels the most secure to them. and when i looked at the available instances.. most looked not really long term secure. most did look like they are random ideas of people and they could vanish any second into the void. so i as an example did choose lemmy.world. seemed the most safe option with the best features (nsfw allowed, a lot of users and a big instance)

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    On a small instance, you have greater opportunities to take action to positively support that instance. You can make friends with the administrator, volunteer to become an administrator yourself, donate cash to offset running costs, lodge helpful reports, welcome new users, etc...

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago*

    agreed, but i'm already moderating a community with 1,3k members elsewhere and have to do a lot of work daily there (posting content for the members who wait for it daily). also i currently start to build one up on lemmy.world that also takes time from my day. i don't really have time in my daily activity to additonally do stuff which involve moderation or managing of such things like a server instance.

    don't understand me wrong, i agree with what you say and its logical and smart to do it. but its always depending on the situation of each user. in my situation, its the best thing to go to a big instance.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    I understand the logic but its actually backwards. A small instance like mine is easily paid for totally out my own pocket and requires no outside funding or maintenance because I can do everything. If too few people donate to major instances then the costs starts to run away from the owners. In some ways becoming too large is a problem.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago* (5 children)

    i understand that, but think about it - its a random instance from a random stranger on the internet. you don't know that person, and don't know if he is actually serious interested in that project of running that instance.. or if he will shut it down maybe a few day, weeks or months in the future.

    and you can't really backup your account and load it somewhere else, so if this happens everything you saved and do is GONE. thats a huge risk if you value your account and contribution to communitys.

    so it doesn't really matters to me if smaller instances are not expensive etc.. thats not what fears people (there are still ways to spread users along more instances but more even). its the suddenly vanishing without warning that scares people.

    i had this often enough with similiar other projects where i created a account on such a small community / instance, was really active.. and suddenly it was just gone from one second to the next without warning. everything gone. admin didn't told anyone about it.. was just gone into thin air.

    so it feels safer to go to instances who are more "trustworthy" in the longterm security of a stable operation.

    if lemmy would support export of accounts maybe ever month once or something.. that would change things. also allow spoofing of stuff, but it would help with vanishing instances and people would feel safer on smaller more unknown instances.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    “i understand that, but think about it - its a random instance from a random stranger on the internet. you don’t know that person, and don’t know if he is actually serious interested in that project of running that instance… or if he will shut it down maybe a few day, weeks or months in the future.”

    Have to be honest with you, that is how all yhe instances started including lemmy.world.

    “so it feels safer to go to instances who are more “trustworthy” in the longterm security of a stable operation.”

    There is no metric by which to know this yet as lemmy is new. Its not like there are 5 servers that are 10 years old and al the rest are just starting up. Just how it is.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (3 children)

    Have to be honest with you, that is how all yhe instances started including lemmy.world.

    but now they have enough reputation & users to make them feel like the safest option

    There is no metric by which to know this yet as lemmy is new. Its not like there are 5 servers that are 10 years old and al the rest are just starting up. Just how it is.

    compared with random instances with 2-3 users or so, a instance who is there since the beginning / relative long compared to other is safer feeling tho.

    i'm so worried about this topic, that i even think about maybe setting up my own instance just to keep my accounts etc safe & from vanishing.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I feel like you have missed the points im my previous comments but if you just want to feel safer because in your heart of hearts this instance or that instance just feels safer then go for it.

    My advice does not change. Make a backup account on another instance to avoid being burned. If you dont want to, then its now on you.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    My exact same thought process and why I'm here on lemmy.world as well. Once they get the server setup process more streamlined (hopefully dockerized) I'll probably setup my own private use server, but until I get around to that project I wanted to pick one that didn't seem like it would vanish once the guy hosting it started getting those hosting bills.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Does that really scale though? The load on a server is not dependent on the number of users, but on the number of communities from other server that the sum of user is subscribing to.

    Which means if you have a server for 100 users, you still need to pay for the 1000s giant communities that those users are subscribing to, as they are being copied over in your server.

    So if you have a few mega server like Lemmy.world, they each pay say 10000£ in hosting a month (number taken out of my hat), which is fine because they have as many users that can contribute to it financially ( via donations, ads etc.). But small servers won't be able to support that load and will ultimately close.

    That sounds like a design flaw if you ask me but i did not see anyone mentioning it so maybe i'm misunderstanding.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    No its not really as bad as that at all. The disk space is linear in that way but disk space is cheap. All the rest is not taxed heavily by federation. Do the big costs like CPU dont scale up like that.

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