sunaurus

sunaurus , 2 months ago

If I have several backends that more or less depend on each other anyway (for example: Lemmy + pict-rs), then I will create separate databases for them within a single postgres - reason being, if something bad happens to the database for one of them, then it affects the other one as well anyway, so there isn't much to gain from isolating the databases.

Conversely, for completely unrelated services, I will always set up separate postgres instances, for full isolation.

sunaurus , 2 months ago

Interesting project! Can you explain the vision a bit more - I understand that every instance can have their own version of an article, but how would a user know which version of an article is most relevant to them to read (and maybe even contribute to)?

sunaurus , 2 months ago

Sorry if you were just making a joke, my sarcasm detector is not really working anymore (/s at the end would help). But if not, this comment really perfectly captures the entitlement in open source.

Now imagine you spend months (or even years) of your free time to build something for people to use freely, and the result is that you get endless comments from random strangers, telling you that you work for them and that you need to respect and be grateful to them. I honestly am impressed that open source still exists at all at this point.

sunaurus , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I just want to add a counter-point to the argument that Lemmy devs are somehow opposed to contributions. In my experience, there has been no resistance to contributing any type of change (I have personally added niche features for running Lemmy in a distributed manner, optimizations, bug fixes, etc). In fact I would claim the complete opposite - I have received plenty of support and good code reviews from maintainers whenever I have wanted to contribute anything.

I think there is truth to the claim that Lemmy maintainers don’t have a lot of patience for people making demands and snarky comments, but that is very different from being opposed to contributions. Also, after running a big instance for a while now, I completely understand this lack of patience - when some of your users just keep being rude to you, it wears down your patience. It’s easy to patiently and kindly respond to the first 100 rude users, but at some point after that, it just becomes gradually more mentally exhausting, to the point where it’s basically impossible.

Even the example provided in the blog post: I don’t think snowe had bad intentions, but I do think they had clearly misinterpreted the situation with that issue, and their comments were needlessly condescending.

sunaurus , 3 months ago

The nice thing about Lemmy is that you can always host your own instance, even if it's only for your own individual use. You can basically use your own instance as a proxy - other instances will not see how or from where you are connecting to your instance.

Large instances are being attacked almost constantly at this point in smaller and bigger ways. Almost all measures we implement to combat these attacks come with some trade-offs for the rest of the userbase.

sunaurus , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

That particular instance was very recently the source of a lot of CSAM and spam, so that’d be why. A lot of instances recently upped their security to combat that.

Just to add some more context, there was an attacker recently who created accounts on several Lemmy instances and used those accounts to spread CSAM. On lemm.ee, this attacker created 4 accounts over a 24h period, but was not able to upload any CSAM to our servers due to our stricter upload rules (we require 4 week old accounts to upload any images at all), and all of the 4 accounts were removed very shortly after creation (most of them within an hour of signing up). The attacker gave up trying to use lemm.ee very quickly, and moved on to other instances.

I just wanted to share this context to illustrate that while indeed the different measures we implement to protect the instance can have a negative impact on legitimate users, I really believe that overall, they have a net positive effect. In addition to Cloudflare DDoS protection and image upload restrictions, we also have a separate content-based alerting layer on top of Lemmy, which allows our admins to quickly notice when something suspicious is going on. As another example, this alerting has allowed us to extremely efficiently deal with a current ongoing spam attack on the Fediverse, and I bet many lemm.ee users aren't even aware of this attack due to the quick content removal. We will continue to improve our defenses, and hopefully try to limit the impact on real users as much as possible, but some trade-offs are necessary here in order to protect the overall userbase.