delendum

exploding-heads.com have recently announced their intention to move to Nostr. Their plan is to leave Lemmy behind entirely, with exploding-heads.com poised to go offline on August 31st 2023.

Original announcement: https://exploding-heads.com/post/765290 Lemdit link: https://lemdit.com/post/735021

According to their admin:

I knew Lemmy had its challenges, but I hoped it would evolve for the better. Sadly after 2 years, the culture of censorship through defederation has only grown stronger.

Meanwhile a better alternative has sprung up in the form of Nostr:

• it lets you own your own profile - if you move to another Nostr app or site, you still keep your content and followers
• it makes censorship very difficult
• it is not perfect, but is evolving for the better very quickly.

As a user you should not be at the mercy of instance operators who are

• petty tyrants, or
• benevolent dictators (who may turn tyrannical at any moment)

I do not feel I can alter the tyrannical direction Lemmy is heading in and I want to dedicate my time and resources to a better alternative.

Some users are questioning the transition to a micro-blogging-style platform like Nostr and the effect this will have on existing Lemmy communities.

About exploding-heads.com

exploding-heads.com is one of the larger Lemmy instances, with ~7.4k registered users.

They are a right-leaning instance which is centered around free speech:

Use humor and facts to hold the ruling class accountable

We are a fun loving community of free people tired of propaganda fed to us government, media, big tech, crony capitalists, and self anointed elites.

exploding-heads.com has received a largely hostile reception from other large Lemmy instances, many of which have chosen to defederate from them.

cross-posted from: https://lemdit.com/post/408034

I like keeping across what is happening with other Lemmy instances so lestat.org was born out of this curiosity.

URL: https://lestat.org

It's similar to lemmy-status.org but with a few notable differences:

• Lestat is running Uptime Kuma
• Lestat monitors all instances listed on join-lemmy.org
• Lestat has a public Discord server where it automatically feeds notifications: https://discord.gg/R8zY7fM5Z8

Criteria for adding instances to Lestat

I will add any instance to Lestat based on these prerequisites:

• The instance is listed on join-lemmy.org
• The instance doesn't host anything illegal in New Zealand

Free services for admins

If you are an instance admin, I can set you up with the following:

• Automatic e-mail notifications when the status of your instance changes (e.g. it goes up or down).
• An uptime badge for your instance in this style:

Send me a message if you'd like any of the above.

I hope you find Lestat useful!

Edit: Added clickable URL and expanded on free admin services to include badges.

hexbear.net is "A leftist social platform centered around community building through discussion, shitposting memes, and sharing content." They are fairly large:

hexbear.net were not a federated instance until recently, when they announced their intent to start federating with a select group of other Lemmy servers.

lemmy.world claimed to see ulterior motives behind this intention and decided to pre-emptively block hexbear.net from being able to federate with them.

It's becoming increasingly apparent that the largest Lemmy instance thinks it has a duty to protect its users against anything that might cause upset, sometimes before it even happens.

lemmy.one has been down for a while now. I've personally noticed that it hasn't been working for over 24 hours, some comments suggest it may be longer than that:

lemmy.one is one of the larger Lemmy instances, with around 7.3k users.

The site does load, however it displays a Lemmy error. This shows that the Lemmy UI is still there and working, but the Lemmy back-end server process is not.

Based on this, it doesn't look similar to the disappearance of vlemmy.net and it's most likely just a technical issue.

So what is going on?

My guess is there are 3 likely scenarios for what went wrong:

• The Lemmy server process crashed (it's known to happen from time to time)
• This is an update gone wrong (the latest Lemmy update in particular is tricky as it requires a DB migration).
• Some other mysterious event messed up the DB

This is a very long time to be struggling with a technical issue and the lack of communication is concerning.

It could be that:

• The admin is just not available to deal with it right now due to real life reasons.
• The DB is now a mess and the Lemmy server process can't be restarted.

I expect they have regular DB back-ups like everyone else and would've rolled back to a previous snapshot by now. I think the most likely scenario is that the admin just isn't available to deal with it.

To fix this requires actual server access, so even though lemmy.one had several Lemmy admins, it's unlikely that all of them have the required access to deal with this issue.

It would be interesting to hear if anyone managed to get in touch with lemmy.one's admin.

Edit: It's back: https://lemdit.com/post/294679

This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.

The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

In terms of security, Lemmy now performs HTML sanitization on all messages which are submitted through the API or received via federation. Together with the tightened content-security-policy from 0.18.2, cross-site scripting attacks are now much more difficult.

Other than that, there are numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements.

Full release notes can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md

I've noticed that traffic from join-lemmy.org dropped off entirely for the past couple of days - it was patchy for a while before that.

It looks like our instance has disappeared from the list, along with others such as lemmy.nz

I'm guessing there are probably more servers missing, but I don't know about them to be able to confirm.

What I do know is this has nothing to do with our uptime and I can see the join-lemmy.org crawler touching base successfully every hour.

I've submitted a bug report for it.

join-lemmy.org is an important part of the Lemmy ecosystem so I do hope this gets identified and resolved.

In the meantime we're a very well kept secret.

lemmy.blahaj.zone has defederated from lemmynsfw.com after discovering a community which they believed had CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material).

They demanded that the community and its members be purged, which lemmynsfw.com refused stating that they couldn't find any evidence of CSAM.

Both sides think they're in the right on this one and I expect more instances will want to react one way or the other.

It has been another eventful week.

InfinityFree announced that all .ml domains are being returned to the government of Mali

What does this have to do with Lemmy, you ask? Plenty:

• lemmy.ml
• lemmygrad.ml
• lemmy.fmhy.ml

As of writing this, lemmy.fmhy.ml is down and it's unclear what will happen to lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.

lemmy.fmhy.ml have announced that user data is safe, though changing domain names is a huge pain for re-federation and nobody really knows how that will work yet.

If you are unable to access communities that used to reside on lemmy.fmhy.ml - this is why.

In general, it's a good idea to stay away from country specific TLDs when hosting an instance, epecially if you don't reside in those countries.

lemmy.world and other instances are suffering through continued DoS attacks

This one unfortunately comes with the territory once you reach a certain size. If you've been struggling to reach lemmy.world recently, this is probably why.

Part of the problem is it's possible to overwhelm the Lemmy server through certain user actions, such as account deletion

Fixing this kind of issue will lead to massive performance benefits for large instances and improve resilience.

Related:

• https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3165
• https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3649

What did I miss?

cross-posted from: https://lemdit.com/post/44993

It looks like lemmy.world had been hacked.

The instance has been defaced, the site is only intermittently accessible, sometimes it redirects to a random video or other nasty URLs

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LOG INTO LEMMY.WORLD UNTIL THIS IS CLEARED UP AND OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENTS ARE MADE BY ITS ADMIN.

My recommendation is to stay away entirely for the time being and monitor other large instances for updates.

Edit: Please refer to https://lemmy.ml/post/1895271 or https://lemdit.com/post/44993 for further updates.

cross-posted from: https://lemdit.com/post/35084

Today I received this text message:

• Opening the URL from a desktop computer redirects to the real NZ Post website.
• Opening the URL from mobile shows a convincing spoofed NZ Post tracking page:

The objective of the scam is to get you to click on "Schedule a Redelivery" and give them your personal details:

They will use this information to contact you and attempt to scam money from you, as well as try any future scams they may come up with.

The combination of URL + believable phishing page makes this scam particularly easy to fall for. If you're from NZ, then it's a good idea to warn your friends and family about it.

I will report the domain but it usually takes a very long time for anything to be done in these cases.