EDIT: TBC, here’s the current message seen when refreshing a PF stream:

“Piefed.social is having a denial of service attack. They are being kept at bay for now but could return with a more effective method. Download your community subscriptions so if you need to move to another server it’ll be painless - with a few clicks you’ll be seeing all the same content as before. See list of alternate servers at here or here.”

Possible causes?

  • Fellow instance that got PO’d somehow? (seems like a major stretch)
  • Just random hackers havin’ fun?
  • Reddit or similar, targeting one of the top growing instance softwares in ActivityPub / FV? EDIT2 : the timing certainly seems to fit for the recent influx of users coming from Reddit. (see comments)
  • Some right-wing entity, not happy about the general rational / left bias to the instance?
  • Other…?

In any case, much thanks to our instance runner and dev for fending off the first wave(!) Hope everything is backed up and possible to be restored if the worst happens.

(seriously, what a shitty way to be repaid for doing a great, ongoing job for the community and FOSS)

  • JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.socialOPEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    “Yup” to just about all that, altho note that the dev / instance runner himself ID’d it as a DDOS attack.

    …its user base has doubled in 3 days.

    Really? That might explain why my communities’ subscriber base took off this week. Do you know what happened to double the base?

            • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
              5·
              2 days ago

              Yeah, it’s probably related to some recent marketing success.

              I highly doubt it’s anything more conspiratorial than some random guy in the social class sometimes referred to as “average redditor” who decided to see what he could do to fuck with people. Not all that much by the looks of it, I didn’t notice any instability at all.

              • JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.socialOPEnglish
                4·
                2 days ago

                I didn’t notice any instability at all.

                Might be that it was caught early, or that it varied in severity and time distribution. We’d need some specific tools trained on the site to know for sure. But given the seriousness of the announcement, I’m not convinced it was just a blip, or whatever.

                • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
                  5·
                  2 days ago

                  For sure it’s something to take seriously. But for me it’s also a sign of just how good Rimu & co are at dealing with this stuff. DDoS attacks are going to happen because we’re trying to do something nice on the internet. It’s nice to see Piefed is as robust as it is.

    • Æ@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      yes its DDOS, but in my comment i meant its nefarious but new influx certainly won t help.