Today, like the past few days, we have had some downtime. Apparently some script kids are enjoying themselves by targeting our server (and others). Sorry for the inconvenience.
Most of these βattacksβ are targeted at the database, but some are more ddos-like and can be mitigated by using a CDN. Some other Lemmy servers are using Cloudflare, so we know that works. Therefore we have chosen Cloudflare as CDN / DDOS protection platform for now. We will look into other options, but we needed something to be implemented asap.
For the other attacks, we are using them to investigate and implement measures like rate limiting etc.
Why is Cloudflare so bad?
Thank you for the amazing job, as always! Cloudflare is a solid solution :)
Sure but maybe something less centralized/proprietary would be preferable
Nothing. DDoS mitigation is inherently an ISP or someone like cloudflare. You will not have success against anybody who knows what they are doing without their help.
Well for now weβll have to stick around with cloudflare. Iβd just would like to see something managed by a decentralized network. I donβt know if it exists, itβs more of a sentiment or a general idea.
Thatβs easier said than done, DDoS mitigation requires a large amount of servers that are only really useful to persist an active DDoS attack. Itβs why everyone uses Cloudflare, because of the amount of customers they serve thereβs pretty much always an active attack to fend off. Decentralization wouldnβt work great for it because you would have to trust every decentralized node not to perform man in the middle attacks. But if you know of any such solution Iβd love to hear it.
Yeah I see the issue but on the other side you would get a more robust network which could also be incentivised by some sort of underlying blockchain technology. The man in the middle attack could also be mitigated on a technical level.
I hope lemmy.world can avoid using Cloudflare which goes against the spirit of Fediverse as itβs just an objectively evil company.
There are thousands of reasons from centralizing internet, abusing their market power, implementing barriers on web automation that can only be bypassed by the priviledged to fingerprinting and tracking users across the whole internet. Itβs a major for-profit market capture corporation - itβs evil by design.