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.
It was brought to my attention that lemmy.comfysnug.space also hosts "loli porn". This content is illegal in New Zealand as well as many other countries.
Needless to say they have been defederated and all their communities purged from our server.
I'm mostly posting this in the spirit of transparency as I don't think this affects anyone here.
Please let me know if you do come across another similar instance, there are simply too many of them out there for me to check proactively.
I sincerely hope that this was the last of them, but if there are more, I also don't think it's worth me making an announcement every time we defederate one. I may instead create a generic defederation post where we keep tabs on who we defederated and why, but I welcome your feedback.
As a reminder, the Lemdit ethos sets out our stance on federation, notably:
Defederating from other instances is an absolute last resort and we will only do so under the following circumstances:
- If their content has the potential to get us into legal trouble
- If they are acting as an attack vector towards us
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.
My guess is there are 3 likely scenarios for what went wrong:
This is a very long time to be struggling with a technical issue and the lack of communication is concerning.
It could be that:
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
You may have noticed that Lemdit was down for about 2 hours earlier (if you did notice, then I hope the status page kept you informed).
Below is a summary of what was done:
Overall it took longer than I hoped it would, but I think it was all worthwhile.
Please let me know if you notice any weird behavior from Lemdit.
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.
@delendum
@lemdit.com